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A a

A
Adenine. A purine base for DNA and RNA that pairs with the pyrimidine base Thymine (T) in DNA and Uracil (U) in RNA. GMW of the isolated base is 135.1 grams per mole.

A
A designation of the standard time one hour ahead of universal time (UT), and of the zone for which it is the local time. This is called a ``standard time zone,'' so naturally there must be multiple standards. Simplest is the ideal standard time zone: the ideal standard time zone A is centered on the meridian 15° east of the prime meridian; specifically, it is the lune between 7.5° E and 22.5° E. Nautical time, used in radio communication by ships when they are outside territorial waters, is based on nautical standard time zones that coincide with the ideal time zones away from land (and apparently are not specifically defined within territorial waters). On land, standard time zone A is the union of those regions by or for which it is adopted. Time zone A includes most of western continental Europe and a continuous swath of countries in Africa.

In continental Europe the zone ranges from Spain to Albania to Norway. Standard time for this part of Europe is more frequently called by descriptive names like `Central European Time' (CET) or the equivalent (e.g., MEZ). The time-zone boundaries within Europe all coincide with international borders. In western continental Europe, only Portugal is in time zone Z -- standard time the same as universal time. (The UK and the Irish Republic also are in the Z time zone.) In the northeast, the time-zone boundary runs along the borders of Norway and Sweden (A) with Finland (B). Finland is the northernmost land in time zone B; islands to the north are Norwegian or Russian, and keep the corresponding times. The line where Norway and Russia abut north of Finland is the border between time zone A and time zone C.

From the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, the time-zone boundary line runs for a ways along the border of Poland with the former Soviet Union. It starts generally eastward along the border of Poland with Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast to the north. (That bit of Russia is most of the northern part of old East Prussia, which included the historic capital Königsberg. The region was assigned to Russia at the Yalta conference. The capital city, and hence the region, was renamed for Kalinin, an old Bolshevik who finally kicked the bucket shortly after the end of the Great Patriotic War. The surviving German population of the region was deported, or allowed to flee. Hey, it just occurred to me: expelling people from their homeland is against international law!) Kaliningrad Oblast is the only part of Russia that keeps standard time A.

The time-zone boundary continues east along the border between Poland and Lithuania (you know, those were a single kingdom not so many centuries ago), then south along the western borders of Belarus and Ukraine (time zone B) with Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary (A). So far, it looks pretty systematic: former bits of the USSR, including the Slavic-language countries that use a Cyrillic alphabet, are all on the B side of the line between zones A and B, while former Warsaw-Pact members other than the USSR, including Slavic-language countries that use a Roman alphabet, lie in time zone A.

Further south, however, this convenient and mnemonic system begins to break down. It seems that some extraneous matter, such as longitude, was allowed into consideration. (That wasn't allowed to interfere on the west: Spain and France are almost entirely within 7.5 degrees of the prime meridian; most of the Portuguese-Spanish border runs just east of the 7.5° W meridian, so Portugal would be mostly in the N time zone, if astronomy mattered very much.) At all events, Romania (with Moldova) is the northernmost former Warsaw-Pact country (aside from the USSR) to be in time zone B. The time-zone boundary continues south along Romania's western border with Hungary and then with Serbia, making the latter southerly country (jugo- means `south-') the northernmost Cyrillic-using country in time zone A.

[This is by a little bit only. Bosnia, which extends almost as far north, uses both Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. A Bosnian immigrant who manages at a local Walgreen's tells me that before the war (when she fled to Germany), television news in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina would alternate alphabets, using Roman characters for captions one day, then Cyrillic captions the next day. (As far as she knows, the practice continues.) She found the Cyrillic inconvenient: although she studied and used both alphabets in school, she was always more comfortable with the Roman characters. Her husband professes surprise that she could find the Cyrillic difficult. Her grandparents used a version of Arabic script adapted to the same language (Serbo-Croatian, called ``Bosnian'' in this context). But Arabic script is a challenge even under ordinary circumstances (i.e., for Arabic). Even though the whole family is Muslim, the Bosnian Arabic script was practically a secret code; grandma would leave a note for grandpa, and he was the only one who could decipher it.

A similar situation, though not as extreme, holds with the use of Hebrew script. My mother is currently studying Yiddish, despite her earlier vow to stop learning new languages. I suppose Yiddish is a fair exception, since German is her native language and Hebrew is one of those languages she studied and half forgot; Yiddish is mostly German, with quite a bit of Hebrew, written in Hebrew characters. The Hebrew words in Yiddish have their Hebrew spellings but are pronounced in the Ashkenazi accent that is no longer regarded as standard. (Yeah, that's a bit like Canadian English: mostly British spellings and pronunciations much closer to American.) On the other hand, Germanic phonology, no less in the Yiddish language than in the standard German, is not a very good fit to the Hebrew script. Heck, just think what the Greeks had to do with a related north Semitic script to write their own Indo-European language.

A big part of the problem is vowels. When you count long and short separately, standard German has about 14 vowels, and Yiddish (``Yiddish'' is an English transliteration of the German and Yiddish word spelled jüdisch in German, meaning `Jewish') not much less. In standard German this profusion is handled partly by digraphs and Umlauts, partly by using doubled consonants to indicate that a preceding vowel is short, and occasionally by memorization. By contrast, Hebrew script represents vowels mostly by indirection.]

The time-zone boundary continues along the western border of Bulgaria with Serbia and Macedonia (or FYROM or whatever), then west along the northern border of Greece with FYROM (don't even think of calling it Macedonia; Masodonia, perhaps) and Albania, on out to the Adriatic.

Gee, time zones are interesting. Time zone A in Africa (where it is typically called the ``West Africa Time'' zone, WAT) includes about 15 countries I know little about, from Tunisia and Algeria in the north to Namibia in the south. Among these only the Democratic Republic of the Congo (old Zaïre) is in two time zones. That is quite appropriate, as it's about the least unified country. Only Tunisia and Namibia observe Daylight Saving Time (DST) -- Tunisia in the Summer and Namibia in the Winter. Man, those guys are crazy. Please don't ask me about Antarctica.

a.
Adjective. One of the ``parts of speech.'' Further discussion, possibly surprising, at the noun entry.

A
Advanced. A prefix that is productive in the grammatical sense. A temporary attribute. A retarded name, as we would have said (and known) in elementary school). SBF offers an initiation into Advanced Smileys.

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A.
Aeschylus. This is the established conventional abbreviation used by classicists (writing in English) in citations. It doesn't stand for Aristophanes (Ar.), Aristotle (Arist.), or Athenaeus (Ath.). Aeschylus is reckoned ``the father of tragedy.'' Mnemonic for the abbreviation: ``A tragedy should be brief.''

A
Alpha. Not the expansion here, just the FCC-recommended ``phonetic alphabet.'' I.e., a set of words chosen to represent alphabetic characters by their initials. You know, ``Alpha Bravo Charlie ... .'' The idea behind the choice is to have words that the listener will be able to guess at or reconstruct accurately even through noise (or narrow bandwidth, like a telephone). Hence, ``Artisan'' would be no good because it might be heard as ``Partisan.''

Personally, I prefer ``Aorta.'' If they ask you to repeat you can say ``Aneurysm.''

A Greek friend of mine has the surname Petr... He made a phone reservation at a restaurant (in the US), and when he arrived they couldn't find him listed: Because the ``p'' is unaspirated (in contrast with initial plosive consonants /p/ and /t/ in English) they had heard ``Etr...'' For a similar but more widely experienced misunderstanding, see the enema entry.

Å
A metric unit named after Anders Jonas Ångström. It's also a special character used in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. For some information about that, see this Aa entry.

A
Amp, Ampere. Abbreviation and symbol for the ampere (also amp), the SI base unit for electric current, named after André Marie Ampère (1775-1836). The electric charge unit is the coulomb, a derived unit defined as one ampere-second (C = A s).

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a
Annus. Latin, `year.'

A+, A+
A-plus is A programming language. It has a strong APL flavor to it.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes source code for three A+ programs.

A
Arbeitsgemeinschaft. See AG.

A
Arts & Sciences. (Shhh!) For an even more extreme abbreviation of A&S, see NATAS.

A
Assist. Scorecard abbreviation.

A.
Atlantic Reporter. Legal publication.

A
Atomic mass number. The number of baryons (protons plus neutrons) in a nucleus. Numerically close to the atomic mass -- the mass of the atom in atomic mass units (amu).

A
Attendance. Scorekeeping abbreviation, if you're keeping score on what's happening in the stands.

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A.
Latin, Aulus. A praenomen, typically abbreviated when writing the full tria nomina.

There are rather many other words which A abbreviates in Latin inscriptions.

A
Diode imperfection factor. Alternate symbol and name for nonideality factor n. I've only ever seen this symbol used in solar-cell work (the conventional solar cell is a diode). See also A0.

A
Time Zone A. UTC+1. Also called CET and MEZ.

Aa, aa
Aa is the two-letter symbol for Å. (Naturally, aa is used for the lower-case form å.) Å is a special (i.e., non-English) vowel symbol used in all the major Scandinavian languages. It's also used by scientists to abbreviate a metric unit that when not abbreviated is typically written Angstrom. It also seems to occur in some English-speakers' pendants (twice for ANNA). (Follow this link for HTML-related information on the ISO-Latin-1 issues.)

Because of some fussy alphabetical-order issues with å, this entry is probably as good a place as any to discuss the alphabets used in Swedish, Icelandic, Danish, and the Norwegian languages, with particular attention to the special vowel symbols.

We start with Swedish, either because the eponymous Ångström was a Swede, or because Swedish is the language for which I am aware of the fewest confusing details. In Swedish, the alphabet starts with the same 26 letters as the English alphabet, followed by å, ä, and ö in that order. I.e.,

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, å, ä, ö.

The letters c, q, w, and z occur only in a few names. The letter w used to be treated as a variant of v, and alphabetization usually ignored the difference. (Words beginning in v and w could be mixed up in a dictionary the same way words beginning in v and V can be mixed up in an English dictionary.) Thus, while the Swedish alphabet was (sometimes) read off with v and w separately named, from the perspective of alphabetization, the alphabet was best regarded as just 28 letters:

a, b, c, ... v, x, y, z, å, ä, ö.

In 2005, the Swedish Academy decreed or suggested or whatever that the v and w be thenceforth treated more distinctly for alphabetization purposes, so the w has its place as further above.

In Danish, æ is used where Swedish uses ä, and ø is usually used in place of Swedish ö. The symbol corresponding to Swedish å, and its place in the alphabet, have changed once or twice in the last couple of centuries. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the double-a was often treated as a distinct symbol on a par with single letters like a or b, the same way ch, ll, and rr are treated in Spanish. In some cases but not all, the double-a assumed the same position in the alphabet as å did in Swedish. Hence, the alphabet was either

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, aa, æ, ø,

or it was

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, æ, ø.

and aa was alphabetized like a pair of letters a. By the 1940's the latter pattern had become common. In 1948, however, there was a spelling reform that replaced aa with å. The question of order was not immediately settled, but in 1955 it was decided to place that symbol at the end of the alphabet, yielding

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, æ, ø, å.

This means that the word for river (aa) was once usually near the end of the dictionary (ordbog), then sort of drifted up to nearly the front, and then in 1955 got kicked even further back than where it began (as å). It must be discouraging to be an aa. (Cf. aa.) Just as in Swedish, w was once treated as a variant, and not distinguished for purposes of alphabetization. [Another item that is (or was) read off as part of the alphabet (in English) but which doesn't (and didn't) count equally in alphabetization: ampersand.] Danish practice was officially conformed to the international pattern (w distinct from v) in 1980.

Again as in Swedish, the letters c, q, w, and z are in fact rare. In addition, the x is also rare in Danish.

Norway had a distinct national language at one point, but over the course of four centuries of Danish rule, Danish became the national language -- both officially and for the creation of literature. After Norway finally became independent of Denmark in 1814, there was a broad desire to distinguish Norwegian from Danish, and to recover a distinct national language. It's a long and lugubrious story, but happily for this entry the Norwegians didn't tamper too much with the alphabet. It is the same now as the Danish alphabet, though they may have been quicker to adopt (and place at the end of the alphabet) the letter å. Hence, the order for Norwegian is again

a, b, c, ... v, w, x, y, z, æ, ø, å.

Norwegian replaced aa with å in 1917. Presumably, commingled feelings of pride and resentment must have accompanied Denmark's conformation to å in 1948.

Icelandic has enough letters. Here is their order for the purposes of alphabetization:

a, á, b, c, d, ð, e, é, f, g, h, i, í, j, k, l, m, n, o, ó, p, q, r, s, t, u, ú, v, w, x, y, ý, z, þ æ, ö

I'm serious about the acute-accented characters: floti (`fleet') precedes fló (`flea'). The letter á corresponds to the å in Danish (so á means `river'). The é was only introduced in the twentieth century, to represent a palatalized version of e that was previously very reasonably written je. One is inclined to suspect that they did it just to have a complete set of acute-accented vowels. The acute marks were originally intended to indicate vowel quantity (i.e., accented vowels were of longer duration), but like the long-short vowel distinction in English, that's gone rather by the boards.

This list is a few too many letters long for schoolchildren to sing. The sung alphabet consists only of

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u (or v), x, y, þ æ, ö.

(Although ð is the voiced version of þ, it is considered ``subordinate'' to d.) The letter z was abolished in 1974, but I left it in the alphabetization alphabet because abolished or no, it is part of names, and some people and institutions continue to insist on using it.

AA
Academy of Aphasia. I had the impression that this organization became moribund along with the late chair of its Board of Governors, linguist Victoria A. Fromkin. What was the matter with my head!? Here's the website.

Try also Alicia Courville's Speech Disorders page or the National Aphasia Association (NAA).

AA
Acronyms Anonymous. See AAAAAA.

AA
Administrative Assistant. Someone not a secretary who handles a share (tending toward the more bureaucratic component) of an administrator's workload. Cf. PA.

AA
Administrative Authority. (ISO term, at least.)

AA
Advertising Association. A UK federation of about 30 ``trade bodies representing the advertising and promotional marketing industries including advertisers, agencies, media and support services.'' They have a logo that consists of two lower-case alphas vertically aligned.

AA
Advising Associate.

AA
Aerolineas Argentinas.

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A. A.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon. Standard abbreviation for classicists (writing in English) in the citations of scholarly papers. Yes, it's meant to be obscure. Hadn't you figured that out yet?

AA
Affirmative Action. As in the EE/AA or EO/AA.

The current use of the term affirmative action goes back to a 1965 executive order (EO) issued by US President Lyndon Johnson. The order required federal contractors to ``take affirmative action'' to see that ``employees are treated fairly during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.''

As initially understood, if it was initially understood, the term referred to positive efforts by employers (or educational institutions) to seek out and hire qualified applicants from under-represented groups and to be proactive in eliminating illegitimate causes of that under-representation. It was initially supposed that mere outreach efforts would suffice to right the historical imbalance.

The landmark Civil Rights legislation of 1964 (which does not use the term affirmative action) was intended to illegalize discrimination based on race alone (rather than any possible statistical correlates of race) and to encourage recruitment of minorities. When the crucial bills were being debated in the Senate, Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), later to be vice-president in the second, full LBJ administration, famously offered to eat the bill page by page if it led to preferential treatment for blacks. (At the time, blacks were the only group recognized as under-represented; afterwards, other groups were given official recognition as under-represented. This official recognition is not affected by the fact that the recognized group is -- as a mathematical necessity -- over-represented in some other field. It is virtually assured as a matter of probability that all groups are under-represented in some field, so we can look forward to a day when all groups enjoy the protection of equal-opportunity laws.)

Black representation in professional, managerial, and other kinds of employment deemed desirable or high-status had been increasing steadily for a number of years before the passage of equal employment opportunity legislation, so it was reasonable to suppose that aggressive recruiting and the elimination of artificial barriers to employment might substantially solve the perceived imbalance problem. In the event, progress was not deemed satisfactory, and during the Nixon administrations affirmative action took on a new meaning. A series of executive orders, administrative-law rules and landmark court cases led to a system of set-asides and quotas, and a supporting system of official lies and evasions. Concomitantly, the meaning of ``qualified'' was adjusted to meet the psychological and ideological needs of the political moment. People who think of themselves as liberal today, and who curse the memory of Richard Nixon, generally subscribe to the cynical vision of civil rights progress put in place by him.

The contradiction in meaning and in underlying assumptions, between AA as initially understood and as eventually implemented, offers the creative pollster the opportunity to prove any desired thesis. If you want to show that people favor affirmative action, you ask people whether they support the principles of the early, minimalist definition of affirmative action. If you want to demonstrate widespread opposition to affirmative action, you describe the most egregious examples of its implementation and ask whether the respondent approves.

AA
Agricultural Area. Abbreviation that occurs in EU statistical literature.

A. A.
Alan Alexander Milne. His series of Winnie-the-Pooh books began in 1924, with Christopher Robin, the young friend of Winnie the Pooh, modeled on his own four-year-old son, Christopher Robin, friend-at-a-distance of a bear named Winnie at the London zoo. The nonfictional Christopher Robin went on to become a bookseller (cf. Zola, discussed at Aix entry).

Christopher Robin Milne was always uncomfortable with his fame.

The rights to the use of the Pooh characters and images are nowadays held by Walt Disney.

A. A. also got his son a teddy bear. That bear currently resides in New York City.

I wonder if these Milnes are any relation to E. A. Milne, the mathematical physicist and Bruce Medalist?

AA
Alcoholics Anonymous. (Also this URL.)

The same abbreviation is used in French (for Alcooliques Anonymes -- sounds kinda cool), German (Anonyme Alkoholiker or Gemeinschaft der Anonymen Alkoholiker) and Spanish (Alcohólicos Anónimos). The Spanish adjective alcohólico is slightly unusual: since the aitch is silent, the word has an o-o diphthong, the two component vowels clearly distinguished (in careful speech) by the stress on the second. FWIW, when the word alcohol was borrowed into Japanese, the -oho- was collaped into a long o: arukôru.

AA
Alzheimer's Association.

We have an Alzheimer's disease (AD) entry.

AA
American Airlines.

A.A.
American Association. A late-nineteenth-century baseball league.

A&A
Amniocentesis and Abortion. This is really a pro-life shibboleth for amniocentesis. Anti-abortion groups tend to take a dim view of amnio. They figure, if you're not considering abortion, there's nothing you need to know in advance. (Not exactly true, particularly nowadays with in utero medical interventions.)

A.A., AA
Anadolu Ajansi. Normally translated `Anadolu Agency,' which isn't very informative to me. Anadolu looks like it could be Turkish for `Anatolia.' In any case, AA is the Turkish national news agency. It was founded on the evening of April 6, 1920, as you will learn on this page, where the word great occurs five times. ``We are proud to do our share towards globalization with perfectionism, accuracy and speed. ANADOLU is a front-runner in the use of communication technologies for the high-end. WE ARE THE LEADING AGENCY'' and an EANA member.

In one of his books, Bernard Lewis describes, inter alia, the history of newspaper publishing in the Muslim world. I think the book's title is What Went Wrong.

AA
An[a]esthesiologist's Assistant. See AAAA.

A&A
Anesthesia & Analgesia. A technical journal.

AA
AntiAircraft (gun[s] or fire). Or Antiaircraft Arms. Slang equivalent ``ack-ack.''

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A&A
Antike und Abendland. Beiträge zum Verständnis der Griechen und Römer und ihres Nachlebens, Berlin.

AA
Application Association.

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AA
Archäologischer Anzeiger. A German archaeology journal catalogued in TOCS-IN.

AA
Arithmetic Average. The thing usually meant by average or mean, when not otherwise qualified. Dictionaries seem overwhelmingly to prefer the term ``arithmetic mean'' to ``arithmetic average'' as a more specific term, but in ordinary usage ``arithmetic mean'' seems to be not even twice as common as ``arithmetic average.'' Frankly, neither the editor nor I can recall encountering the term ``arithmetic average'' before. The term doesn't seem to be limited in distribution to the RotW (outside North America, in this instance). What probably happened is that google invented 800,000 bogus web pages to fake us out. Either that, or it's a dumbed-down term invented and used by people who didn't absorb (very deeply) mathematics and its conventional terminology in school.

The words average and mean, if not explicitly qualified, both mean a sum divided by the number of its addends. This is, in general terms, a ``measure of central tendency.'' Two other measures of central tendency are the median and mode. One might call these discontinuous measures, since their values are discontinuous functions of the numbers whose distribution they describe the central tendency of. Other continuous measures of central tendency are usually named with the word mean. The most common such alternatives that I can think of are ``geometric mean,'' ``harmonic mean,'' and ``logarithmic mean.''

In Hong Kong, the phrase ``AA <system>'' (with AA pronounced as an English initialism and <system> representing a Chinese or Cantonese translation of the English word system) is the practice of splitting a restaurant or entertainment bill. Presumably this arose specifically from the practice of dividing the bill equally, so each person paid the AA cost. I'm not sure whether the term is still used strictly in this sense or may also now refer to an arrangement in which all individuals pay their own expenses. The latter is called ``Dutch treat'' in English-speaking countries (and ``pagar a la americana'' in South America). I needn't have explained my uncertainties. I could have just said the AA system means ``to go Dutch'' without further specification and left it at that, but I wanted to share.

(In China as in the US, Chinese restaurants usually serve dishes to the table, and individuals serve themselves. Hence, there is only one straightforward way to share the expenses, and no ambiguity.)

AA
(US) Armed Forces (in the rest of the) Americas. Designation excludes US and Canada. This region is loosely called ``Central and South America,'' which technically would exclude the Caribbean and also (irrelevantly for the foreseeable future, though not for the foreseeable past) Mexico. Two-letter ``state'' code used by the MPSA and USPS. (For USPS purposes, US Armed Forces stationed out-of-country are served by ``domestic mail,'' and so require a ``state'' code.)

Mail bound for the AA region used to be (and I believe still is) routed through processing centers at Miami, and used to be nominally bound for Florida. Using FL (for Florida) instead of AA still works for mail, but will probably cause problems with credit-card verification, so don't do it. For more on MPSA/USPS military mail, see the MPO entry.

AA
Associate in Arts. A two-year post-secondary degree.

A&A
Astronomy & Astrophysics.

AA
Atomic Abs. Ventral annihilation. A six-pack of twenty-ounce cans of U-235. Buff b... Oh. Actually, AA is short for Atomic Absorption. Never mind. See AAS instead.

AA
German, Auswärtiges Amt -- `Foreign Office' (FO).

AA
Author's Alterations. Authors' Alterations, if the work is a conspiracy. Changes to the proofs after they're in galley. Doesn't that sound cool and insiderish? It's probably nonsense. AA is changes made to the text that's done up in galley proofs. Book contracts usually have a clause that you didn't notice, to the effect that if AA's are substantial, the author is penalized. I contributed to an encyclopedia, however, which due to time constraints was typeset during reviews. I don't know what they do when the reviews are unfavorable or ask for extensive changes.

AA
Auto Answer. A standard light on an external modem.

AA
Automobile Association. The name of the Automobile Association of Britain. There's also a Royal Automobile Club (RAC), but I couldn't find anything about it using the search engine at AA.

AA
Average Audience. A broadcast-industry variable whose value is a number. The number is not a measure of audience intelligence, average or otherwise.

AA
Double-A. When letters are used to indicate sizes, as in shoe or brassiere sizes, it is necessary to select an appropriate range. As time passes, if the system is successful, it often occurs that the customer base begins to include individuals outside the original range. Since A typically refers to the smallest size (or ends up doing so), something must be done. Hence, AA electric batteries, AA shoes, and AA cup sizes. (Sometimes this repeated-letter scheme is used even though a single-letter scheme is possible. For an example of this puzzling and inexplicable phenomenon, see the grade inflation entry.) Batteries are available down to AAAA at least (vide 9V battery entry); I'm not sure about shoes and bras, but here's the latest information we have managed to uncover on bra sizes.

If shoulders are back in fashion and you're thinking about fixing up your old blouse but can't find the right-size shoulder pad in the ``Home Fashions'' section, experiment with bra cups. This reminds me of the scene in the movie theater from Summer of '42. Now let's get back to...

This just in (from Reuters, dateline May 2003, Taipei): ``Villagers in southern Taiwan are strapping bras to their faces to guard against the deadly SARS virus due to a shortage of surgical masks.'' A local factory is actually recycling its own colorful bras, cutting them and sewing on new straps. I don't understand why the factory has to cut anything to begin: don't they have a supply of cups or something? I should probably say that I will be following this story as closely as is decently possible, but I won't.

The first sports bra was invented in 1977 by Lisa Lindahl, a jogger, and her childhood friend Polly Smith, a costume designer. Lisa's sister dubbed the project ``a jockstrap for women.'' While Lisa and Polly were working on a prototype, Lisa's husband came in and playfully pulled a jockstrap over his head and around his chest. They were inspired, and Polly fashioned a model constructed of two jock straps sewn together. (The story here is condensed from this page.) From (the general vicinity of) athletic cups to bra cups, and from bra cups to shoulder pads, it seems fashion moves ever upwards. The German word for glove is Handschuh (yes, literally `hand shoe').

In the US in 1999, 130,000 women underwent breast augmentation surgery, a factor-of-four increase from 1992, the year that silicone implants were banned for cosmetic use. (In November 2006 the FDA reapproved them for all uses where saline implants were approved.) To any mathematically competent person, it had already been clear in 1992 that silicone implants are just as safe as saline implants, but people are stupid about statistics. Silicone is also more natural-looking unless there's a leak. (If saline leaks, it's absorbed.) During the dark ages (1992 to 2006) silicone remained legal to replace a failed saline implant and in certain other applications. Also, the shell that holds the saline solution in saline implants is made of silicone.

But you know, those implants require more upkeep than the sealed battery on my old Honda, and they don't necessarily last much longer. Research has been ongoing; alternatives studied have included polyvinylpurolidone (PVP) implants and reconstruction using fat from elsewhere in the body. (I guess moving it from the wrong places to the right places kills two birds with one stone. Liposuction is gaining in popularity too, you know.) Last I heard, the clinical trials were being conducted in Europe, where the litigation risk is lower. Apparently the only alternative that has been widely commercialized is the gummy-bear implant, which is an incremental modification of the regular silicone implant: the filling is silicone polymerized with more crosslinking monomers, resulting in a rubbery gel rather than a viscous one.

Sixty percent of women getting augmentation in 1999 were aged 19-34. Thirty-five percent were aged 35-50. (The other 5% includes about 1% under 18.) Often the augmentation is to achieve symmetry or for prosthetic purposes after other surgery. A smaller number of women go under the knife to decrease their size.

Dr. Judith Reichman, regular guest physician on the Today Show, wants you please to understand that ``Very few women do it to please a male figure in their lives. When we say that, we are under-valuing a woman's concerns.'' It's not about that at all! It's about looking good in clothes or looking good out of them. As you know, women dress for other women. Men don't matter. Women engage in competitive dressing -- that's what public events are for.

There was something relevant in the December 2006 issue of Psychology Today. (That should have set off your BS monitor, of course, so you won't be perturbed that the article contradicts Reichman's PC pieties.) It was an article by Marcelo Balive on page 19 (in the INSIGHTS section; you may find it helpful to raise the trip level on your BS monitor) entitled ``A Model Society: South America's Obsession with Plastic Surgery.'' More than half of the article's real estate is taken up by a very informative illustration of Miss Venezuela 2005 Monica Spear apparently literally disrobing. Color caption: ``Latin Americans have won 11 of the last 25 Miss Universe titles.'' In the booooody of the article: ``Although no official statistics are compiled, Argentina is among the top-ranked countries in per capita rates of cosmetic surgery, says Guillermo Flaherty, president of the Argentine plastic surgeons' association.'' The article ends with the recollection of an American woman who had recently lived in Argentina: her gym's locker room was an exhibition hall of breast implants. It reminds me of an American I knew who spent his last year of high school in England (ca. 1979). He was the only one circumcised. I mean, he was the only one who was circumcised. I mean he, oh never mind. He said he felt like an alien -- which, of course, he was.

In theater seating, X, Y, Z may be followed by AA, BB, CC. I'll have to check next time, if I arrive before the lights dim. Dang! I was at an amphitheater that seated eight hundred, and the top row was K. I'm going to have to choose more popular events.

The desire to look good in clothes, and not for a male figure in one's life, is sometimes called the ``Academy Awards Effect.'' Another Academy Awards effect is that the stars who attend them often lack the money or the bad judgment to buy the million-dollar jewelry and hundred-thou duds they wear there. Those're on loan from jewelers and fashion designers, who sell them to customers who only wish they were movie stars. See the AD entry for more on the male figure.

AA also occurs in a kind of positional numbering scheme based on letters. These differ from ordinary positional systems (such as the decimal system, say) because there's no zero. In this kind of numbering, or labeling, X, Y, Z are followed by AA, AB, AC, .... Ordered lists can be numbered using this scheme in HTML (see our example), as well as nroff and troff.

aa
Rough, cindery lava. A term that finds its principal application in Scrabble®. All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept it and its plural aas.

The term was adopted by geologists (C.E. Dutton in the first place, in 1883) from the Hawaiian language. (Geologists like to do that. They adopted cwm from Welsh, when they could have used an English cognate like coomb. Obviously, geologists are closet Scrabble freaks.) In the original Hawaiian, this (aa, not cwm) is spelled a'a. In Hawaiian, Hawaii is spelled Hawai'i. That apostrophe represents a glottal stop consonant, something like the sound that substitutes for intervocalic /t/ in Cockney as well as in some words (e.g., cotton) in much of the US. The name of the capital of Yemen (.ye) -- Sana'a -- has a similar sound.

I wonder if a'a didn't get its name from the sound people make when they try to walk over it barefoot. Then it would be an onomatopoeia'a. No wait, don't blame me, I didn't make it up, honest! Apparently the opportunity to neologize with as many as four or more consecutive vowels overcomes all restraint. See this posting by David Lupher (to the famous classics list) for other examples.

Much nicer stuff than aa is pahoehoe, which has a smooth, lined surface that looks like thick rope or driftwood. It gets this appearance from the cooling process: the surface cools and begins to harden while the interior is still fluid. As the interior moves and drags the surface along with it, the outer surface is stretched, giving rise to the lines. This is possible only if the interior is not very viscous, so it continues to flow even when it is close to solidifying. The smoothness of the surface is also a consequence of the low viscosity (equivalently, the high fluidity): surface tension acts to smooth exposed surfaces, and is most effective when it has to overcome a smaller rather than a larger viscous resistance. Another difference, again consistent with the viscosity trend, is that aa tends to come in larger blocks, while pahoehoe is thin (and fast-moving while molten, get out of there!).

The difference in viscosity that determines whether aa or pahoehoe will form corresponds to a slight difference in silica content, and a single eruption can produce both (usually pahoehoe precedes aa). High silica content (60%) gives a viscous magma and aa. Because the high viscosity prevents gases from escaping easily, this is associated with explosive volcanoes like Mount St. Helens. Magmas with low silica content (50%), like those of Hawaiian island volcanoes, are more fluid and less explosive. That's why the Hawaiians have lots of cool-looking (or hot) pahoehoe.

AAA
Abbreviations And Acronyms. Well, I've seen at least one instance of this usage.

AAA
Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm[s].

AAA
Against All Authority. A South Florida punk band whose logo is a parody of the automobile-club AAA's.

AAA
Age Anaesthesia Association. ``[A]n association of anaesthetists with an interest in the anaesthetic problems of the elderly, under the auspices of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland [AABGI].''

See also John Ascah's Aged Anaesthesia page.

AAA
Aging Active Adult.

AAA
Agricultural Adjustment { Act | Administration }. A New Deal project to limit agricultural overproduction. Some of its more controversial methods were plowing under crops instead of harvesting them, and slaughtering livestock and discarding the carcasses.

AAA
Air Avenue of Approach. Aviation acronym. Duh.

AAA
Always Add Acid. Mnemonic for the lab safety prescription: when mixing strong acid or acid anhydride with water, (slowly) pour the acid into the water, rather than the other way around. Another mnemonic, which works better with rhotacizing and derhotacizing accents, is ``Do like you oughta, add acid to water.''

AAA
Amateur Astronomers Association of NY.

AAA
American Academy of Addictionology.

The presence of the above name in this glossary does not imply an endorsement of that last word. The presence of the acronym does not imply an endorsement of the entity, of whose existence, happily, little sign appears to remain on the internet. This page by Steven Barrett, M.D., provides some interesting information on Jay Holder, perpetrator of addictionology seminars, president and cofounder of American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders (ACACD), graduate of assorted non-accredited quackery mills, and apparent inventor of ``torque-release technique.'' Jay Holder is a legitimate holder of a DC degree from National College of Chiropractic, which might say something about that degree. (For some reason, perhaps including the esteem in which the word chiropractic is held, that college has taken a new name.)

The word ``addictionology'' has come to be widely used. It may well be that some nonquacks use it.

AAA
American Academy of Audiology. Funny, I never heard of them.

AAA
American Allergy Association.

They're not trying to promote it.

AAA
American Anthropological Association. Founded 1902, became a constituent society of the ACLS in 1930. ACLS has an overview.

AAA
American Arbitration Association.

AAA
American Association of Anatomists.

AAA
American Athletic Association. Yes, yes, there are indeed Amateur Athletic Associations as well as American Athletic Associations, but there used to be an organization called simply the American Athletic Association.

AAA
American Automobile Association. No one says ``Ay Ay Ay.'' It's ``triple-ay.''

AAA
Anesthesia Administration Assembly. Not a mechanical device, but an assembly within the context of the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). Founder and first president is Edward L. King, FACMPE.

AAA
Animal Acupuncture Academy. It's about humans performing acupuncture on animals, not the other way around. Veterinary acupuncture. In this context, those who do acupuncture on humans are called human acupuncturists, which under the circumstances is clear enough.

AAA
Animal-Assisted Activities. Human activities assisted by animals, like eating beef. No? Oh, I get it: seeing-eye dog, hearing-ear dog, fox-hunting. (Cf. AAT.)

Actually, fox-hunting almost doesn't qualify, because the hounds do all the work of pursuing the fox and killing and eating it (except for the comb, mask, and pads, of course). It might be called a human-assisted activity, since a human (the master of the hounds or his assistant) trains and may otherwise assist the hounds -- by, for example, sealing off before the hunt some foxholes that the fox might try to escape to. (They say there are no atheists in foxholes? How could they be sure?) But it is animal-assisted, in fact, because in the classic English fox hunt, the human activity is trying to keep up with the hounds, and horses assist in this activity by carrying the humans as they perform it. That's how I see it, anyway.

Seeing-eye dog work is the only AAA I have even the slightest direct experience of. One day on the main ASU campus, I saw a man a few yards ahead of me, standing patiently before a chain-link fence that closed off part of the sidewalk. A dense traffic of students was flowing around him. I came up and said ``...your dog stopped because they tore up the sidewalk.'' ``Can you lead me around it?'' ``Sure. How does it work?'' ``Just talk to me, and the dog will follow you.'' So we did that, and as I described our surroundings it turned out that we almost immediately overshot his next turn.

The dog's behavior surprised me, because the section of sidewalk closed off was only about four feet in diameter. The street had negligible traffic (it was sealed off by a card-entry gate) and one could actually continue by walking along the curb or by going only slightly off the sidewalk on the side away from the street. The dog could easily see how to go around, but was apparently trained not to take that initiative. (I wondered whether the dog conceived the task in terms of a destination and a preferred path, or in terms of an unmotivated sequence of specified paths.) On the other hand, the dog was expected to respond appropriately to its perception of the owner's social interactions. I guess I'm not surprised if dogs are better at understanding social interactions than pedestrian traffic. Still, for a long time afterwards I was haunted by the idea that I might have retrained the dog to overshoot the next turn and then do a dog-leg to get back to it.

The training of a seeing-eye dog has elements resembling the design of an interactive computer program. So many possible inputs! So many failure modes! Actually, the main resemblance to programming is that it rarely works correctly the first time. Both must be debugged or whatever. I gather from what I've read that part of the training involves focusing on isolated situations (e.g., how to exit a bus). So that would be like teaching ``methods.'' It seems that at least the terminology of OOP is a better fit to dog training than to programming. It typically takes about three years to program a new pup into a seeing-eye dog (a/k/a guide dog).

I remember reading a news item some years back, maybe around 2000, about a seeing-eye dog that was abused by its owner and that killed him by leading him into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The dog survived, so I recall. This story has its improbabilities, and it resembles a widely retold joke (in which both dog and owner survive) that you can find on the Internet. I've checked Lexis-Nexis and Google (News, Web, and Blogs) with a variety of search strings, and I've failed to turn up the story. You can take it for what it may be worth: either I have an extremely retentive memory for obscure and evanescent news stories, or I'm a highly creative author of fiction without even knowing it.

Here's another kind of AAA that I'm not very familiar with: picking up members of the apposite sex. I remember, or at least I think I remember, that Freud mentioned this somewhere. He referenced the idea that prostitutes were well-known to walk their dogs, as a way to start conversations with prospective customers. I was a child when I read this; perhaps there was also the idea that walking a dog excused what might otherwise be loitering. You could look it up, I suppose, by reading enough of Freud's works. (There's a list of the ones you can skip below.) Anyway, I was reminded of this by an AFP news item on July 31, 2008: ``Saudi bans sale of pet dogs and cats.''

The previous day, according to the report, Othman Al Othman, head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Riyadh, known as the Muttawa, told the Saudi edition of the Al Hayat daily that the commission had started enforcing an old religious edict against selling pet cats and dogs or exercising them in public. The reason for reviving the enforcement of this edict was an alleged rising fashion among some men of using pets in public to make passes at women and disturb families. No further explanation was offered. It seemed that the new enforcement of the old edict might be restricted to Riyadh only, but one never knows.

Here is a list of the works of Freud for which I can easily find complete etexts (mostly Gutenberg) in English or German. The observation mentioned above doesn't appear to be in any of these.

AAA
Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology (Liverpool).

AAA
Anti-Aircraft Artillery. Also AA. The most common sense of AAA in military usage. See ack-ack. I heard a troop (that would be the singular, right?) interviewed by CNN pronounce this ``triple-Ay.''

AAA
Archives of Asian Art. ``Archives of Asian Art is a journal of the Asian Society, one of the world's foremost institutions dedicated to building bridges of understanding between Americans and Asians. It provides information and insights about Asia and the Pacific, and offers fresh perspectives on the forces and issues that are shaping Asia's relations with the United States and the rest of the world.'' Published once per year, and an annual subscription costs WOW! I mean, where WOW is 55 euros in the EU and 58 euros in the ROW.

AAA
Area Agency on Aging. Uh, yeah, could you have a look at my knee area? See n4a.

AAA
Association of Authors' Agents. An industry organization in the UK, for collective discussion and representation. Agents must be three years in the business before they can join. (This business of establishing membership thresholds seems to be a book-industry thing. In the US, PEN has a threshold for prospective writer-members. In contrast, to join the typical scientific membership society, you mostly just need a couple of current members to vouch for you.)

If you're a writer looking for an agent, try the Writers' Guild of Great Britain (this link may be more robust), the SoA, or the ALCS. The US organization corresponding to the AAA is the AAR. More general discussion of agent associations there.

AAA
Australian Automobile Association. ``The official voice of motoring in Australia since 1924... represents'' six state-wide motoring organizations and one each for the Sydney area and the Northern Territory.

aaa
Autos, Avus, Attraktionen. (Berlin.)

AAA
Triple-A. A size smaller than AA, q.v.

AAAA
Amateur Athletic Association of America.

AAAA
American Academy of Anesthesiologist Assistants.

AAAA
American Association for Advertising Agencies. ``Four A's.''

Selected Letters of James Thurber, p. 209, has a letter of August 15, 1959, rejecting a request for Thurber to participate in some project of the A.A.A.A. While he pleads ill health and lack of time, his contempt for the organization is not entirely concealed. He seems to go off on a tangent:

... Youngsters now bring babble boxes for me to talk into, as we sink further and further into the new Oral Culture. The written word will soon disappear and we'll no longer be able to read good prose like we used to could. This prospect does not gentle my thoughts or tranquil me toward the future.

    Thanks anyway and I hope those creative spirits learn how to get through to people the literate way.
AAAA
American Association for Affirmative Action. They're in favor of it. See also the CCRI entry.

AAAA
The American Association of Amateur Astronomers. (Here's an alternate link.)

AAAA
Quad-A. A size smaller than AAA. Vide AA entry for yet more profound enlightenment. Some nine-volt batteries are packages of six series-wired 1.5V AAAA batteries.

AAAAA
American Association Against Acronym Abuse.

AAAAAA
Association for the Abolition of Abused Abbreviations and Asinine Acronyms. [Like maybe A7NHY (Aaaaaaardvark No homepage yet). Cf. TLA.] Considerably older than...

AAAAAA
Association for the Alleviation of Absurd Acronyms and Asinine Abbreviations. An international organization ``to tax and control the proliferation of initials'' so we don't choke on our alphabet soup. Proposed in The Economist, in a tongue-in-cheek article entitled ``AA (acronyms anonymous)'' [issue of Dec. 11, 1999]. Amelioration or Abatement would have been better words than Alleviation.

As of January 5, 2004, there were 85 entries whose head terms included the letter A and no other letter. Oh sure, we could expand this number considerably, but we're very selective. Cf. AAAAAA.

AAAAI
American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. See also FAN.

AAAASF
American Association for Accreditation of Ambulatory Surgery Facilities. ``A voluntary program of inspection and accreditation in surgery facilities to ensure excellence and quality care to patients.'' The October 2001 symposium in Dallas was cancelled. See also AAAC and AAAHC.

AAABEM
American Association of Acupuncture and Bio-Energetic Medicine. Look, why don't you just buy yourself one of those copper bracelets? Convert the money you save into US dollar bills (while the mint still deigns to keep them in circulation) and put a few pictures of pyramids next to your hip.

AAAC
Academic Affirmative Action Committee.

AAAC
American Academy of Ambulatory Care. Related entries: AAAHC and AAAASF.

AAAC
Association of Accrediting Agencies of Canada -- Association des agences d'agrément du Canada. ``To ensure the highest[-]quality education of professionals, the Association of Accrediting Agencies of Canada pursues excellence in standards and processes of accreditation.'' Corresponds to ASPA in US.

AAACN
American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing. Cf. AAAC.

AAACRR
Maybe you have in mind A3CR2.

AAAD
American Athletic Association of the Deaf. Old name of the USADSF.

AAAD
Asian Academy of Aesthetic Dentistry. It doesn't have any very obvious official website, even as of late 2008.

The official publication of the AAAD is the Asian Journal of Aesthetic Dentistry, published in Singapore. Articles are in English, and the first volume was published in 1993. The AAAD holds a general meeting biennially; with the first meeting apparently in 1990.

AAAE
American Association for Adult Education.

AAAE
Archives of American Aerospace Exploration. ``[F]ounded by the Digital Library and Archives of the University Libraries of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in April of 1986. Its purpose is to find, preserve, and make available to researchers collections of correspondence, notes, photographs, written or recorded reminiscences, memorabilia, oral histories, as well as any other items that document American aeronautical and space history.'' Hint: not just any reminiscences. Don't call with recollections of your own first flight unless it was so interesting that you got killed. ``The AAAE seeks such collections from pilots, astronauts, researchers in industry and academia, NASA administrators and project managers, and any others who have played a part in the development of United States aerospace history.''

AAAE
Association for the Advancement of Arts Education. ``The AAAE is the direct result of a comprehensive two-year study which surveyed hundreds of superintendents, principals, teachers, parents, school board members, artists, professional arts administrators and community leaders regarding their views on arts education. The study found a positive element for change in arts education priorities and programs in the Cincinnati area.''

AAAH
American Association of Alternative Healers. God help us! -- sometimes literally. Cf. AQA.

AAAHA
American Amateur Arabian Horse Association.

AAAHA
Ann Arbor Amateur Hockey Association.

AAAHB
Reserve this letter sequence now! Five-letter sequences in this desirable region of the dictionary are going fast! Contact the initialism registry today!

AAAHC
Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care. Ambulatory health care: treating the walking pneumonia (and the boogy-woogy blues). Hence, an alternate expansion: A -- A -- AH -- Choo!

Cf. Achoo! -- The Medical Search Engine. (Gesundheit!)

Related entries: AAAC and AAAASF.

AAAHD
Associação dos Amigos do Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático do Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros (MNE). Portuguese `Association of the friends of the historical diplomatic archive of the ministry of foreign businesses.'

AAAI
American Association for Artificial Intelligence. AAAI homepage had a nice, understated background texture, and very intelligently included the URL address of the AAAI homepage. AI is a fast-paced field, however, and all that has changed. Founded in 1979.

AAAL
American Association of Applied Linguistics.

The AAAL passed resolutions opposing ballot initiatives in California and Arizona to end the ghettoization of Hispanic students in bilingual education programs, although that isn't exactly the way the AAAL sees it.

AAALAC
American Association for the Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care. Created by the ACP in 1965 to test the waters of the Aardvark region of name space. Alack and alas, deciding not to go the whole three consecutive A's, ACP changed its name to AALAS in 1967.

AAALF
American Association for Active Lifestyles and Fitness. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

AAAM
Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. Committed to squeezing your lemon back into shape. Ohnowait -- I should have visited the website first. It turns out they want to decrease the risk of injuries and fatalities. One way to do that: cancel the 45th Annual Meeting, in San Antonio, Texas, originally scheduled for September 23-26, 2001. No final decision on whether to reschedule had been made when I first wrote in this entry on October 9, 2001, but it was eventually held in that city on October 24-26, 2001.

The AAAM was founded in 1957 ``by the Medical Advisory Committee to the Sports Car Club of America by six practicing physicians whose avocation was motor racing.''

AAANA
American Academy of Ambulatory Nursing Administration. For nursing administrators who are on their feet, so far as I know -- no webpage yet. Next time I'm in Pitman, New Jersey, I'll be sure to walk over and ask. Hmmm... there're some names -- AAAASF, AAAC, AAAHC -- in which ``ambulatory'' doesn't modify ``administration.'' Oh! Now I get it!

AAAO
The Alliance of Arkansas Animal Organizations. ``God Bless the Animals, America, and the World.''

Bring back Eric Burdon.

AAAOM
American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. (No ``other'' in the name.) Aaah: om.

AAAP
American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. It's got a snappy jingle -- let's go back again! The ABPN offers certification in the subspecialty of addiction psychiatry.

AAAP
American Association of Avian Pathologists. The pathologies, not the pathologists, are avian. On the other hand, the rhinovirus flu that peaks each Winter uses domestic-animal hosts that include not just mammals (especially pigs) but also fowl (ducks and chickens). Actually, the important nonhuman host population is supposed to be in Asia, so for my purposes they're foreign domestic animals.

AAAP
Asian-Australasian Association of Animal Production Societies. Never ``AAAPS'' or ``AAAAP.''

AAAPP
American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology. The AAAPP has an eponymous mailing list.

AAAS
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780. Membership by invitation only. Society's journal named after the Telemachus of James Joyce's Ulysses.

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1919. ACLS has an overview.

AAAS
American Association for the Advancement of Science. ``Triple-Ay Ess'' was founded in 1848. Membership by invitation: anyone who can pay the dues is invited to join. I wonder what it takes to become a Fellow. They publish one of the various magazines that have the title Science.

AAAS
Austrian Association for American Studies, founded in 1975. A constituent association of the EAAS. ``AAAS'' is the standard abbreviation, but their name is also (or officially?) Österreichische Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien.

The current (early 2004) officers of the AAAS are distributed among an Institut für Amerikanistik (`Institute for Americanistics') at Karl-Franzens-Universität in Graz, an Institut für Amerikastudien at Universität Innsbruck, and units called Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (* Englistics -- what a word! what a word!) in Salzburg, Klagenfurt, and Vienna. Recent AAAS conferences (including the EAAS conference 2000, held in Graz) have been in these cities. Why have you got a problem with this? It's a small country.

AAASP
Association for the Advancement of Applied Sports Psychology.

AAASS
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, founded in 1948 for the purpose of publishing an American journal in the Slavic field; it was not a membership society until 1960. It grew out of the Committee on Slavic Studies, which was established by the ACLS in 1938, and the AAASS did not itself become a constituent society of the ACLS since 1984. ACLS has an overview.

According to itself, AAASS is a ``nonprofit, nonpolitical, scholarly society which is the leading private organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Russia, Central Eurasia, and Eastern and Central Europe.''

As it happens, not everyone in these areas is a Slav, so the statement constitutes a political, nonscholarly statement that does not advance knowledge. People who think you can't please everybody are optimists; you can't please anybody.

AAAST/APAST
African Association for the Advancement of Science and Technology / Association africaine pour l'avancement des sciences et techniques.

AAB
Allergiker- und Asthmatiker-Bund. (Germany.) Interesting that English lacks a shorter word for ``Allergy-sufferer'' when it has words like hypoallergenic.

AAB
American Association of Bioanalysts.

AABA
American Anorexia Bulimia Association.

AABB
American Association of Blood Banks. ``Advancing Transfusion and Cellular Therapies Worldwide.'' Hemocyte therapy by phone? Cool! Taking ``outpatient'' to the next level!

AABH
Association of Ambulatory Behavior Healthcare. ``A powerful forum for people engaged in providing Mental Health Services.''
``Promoting the evolution of flexible models of responsive cost-effective ambulatory behavioral healthcare.''

Based in Alexandria, Virginia -- conveniently close to the nation's capital.

AABIC
The Association for the Advancement of Brain Injured Children. (``Brain Injured'' here refers to something more severe than an impaired facility for inserting hyphens in attributive phrases requiring them.) AABIC is an organization in the state of Western Australia that is a ``support group for families who have a family member undertaking a rehabilitation treatment programme. The Association also provides equipment, library facilities, incontinence pad scheme and family support officers.''

AABP
American Academy of Behavioral Psychology. Now the AACBP.

AABP
American Association of Bovine Practitioners.

It's good to have a ready comeback when she says ``You're such an animal!'' Cf. AASP.

AABS
Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. Founded 1968, became a constituent society of the ACLS in 1991. ACLS has an overview.

AABSS
American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences. ``[A]n interdisciplinary professional society designed to serve faculty and administrators at four-year colleges and universities. The annual meeting offers a collegial forum for participants to share research, ideas for professional development, and academic concerns in all areas of the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Student participation is encouraged.''

AABT
Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy. Now the ABCT.

AABW
AntArctic Bottom Water.

AAC
Agriculture et Agroalimentaire Canada. AAFC en Anglais.

AAC
American Anglican Council. The AAC and the ACN are two American Anglican organizations similarly dedicated to ``biblical authority, the Great Commission and the historic faith and order of Anglicanism.'' The AAC is trying to reform (i.e., undo recent reforms of) the Episcopal Church (ECUSA); the ACN is trying to build a lifeboat in case AAC fails and the ECUSA sinks.

You know, I'm really impressed with the passion, dedication, and faith of these, um, zealots, errr, re-reforming crusaders, err, whatever. I'm considering burning in hell for eternity so that they can be right.

AAC
Amperes AC. Term parallel to ADC and VAC.

AAC
Asia-Africa Conference. This conference, held in 1955, was so important that the name is normally spelled out, so that it is not confused with all of the many other AAC's with which context might allow it to be confused. (AAC? AAC?) In fact, David E. Hall's African Acronyms and Abbreviations: A Handbook, only lists AAC, AAC, AAC, and AAC. All that mutually validating bellyaching led to the formation of the NAM.

AAC
ATM Access Concentrator. Interfaces legacy system to ATM.

AAC
The Audiology Awareness Campaign.

AACA
American Association of Certified Appraisers. Has members throughout the English-speaking parts of North America.

AACAP
American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

The University of Michigan used to host a site for AACAP, and still has a useful page.

AACAR
Association for the Advancement of Central Asian Research.

AACBP
American Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. Previously the AABP. See also ABCT.

Just offhand, I'd have to say that <americanacademyofbehavioralpsychology.org> is the longest domain name I can recall.

AACC
Airport Associations Coordinating Council.

AACC
Alburtis Area Community Center. Alburtis in Pennsylvania.

AACC
All Africa Conference of Churches. You can't get any web content until you choose English or français (for CETA) on the start page. For a moment, I thought it was the All Africa Conference of Canadians.

AACC
The American Association for Clinical Chemistry.

AACC
The American Association for Contamination Control. The existence of an organization with this initialism and expansion is alleged in a few glossaries and one of that putative organization's standards is even referred to in a .com page, but I have my doubts.

AACC
American Association of Cereal Chemists.

AACC
American Association of Community Colleges. Holds its annual convention in April.

AACC
Anne Arundel Community College. Anne Arundel County is in Maryland. ``Anne Arundel'' is pronounced there as a single word with primary stress on the third syllable and secondary stress on the initial syllable. The county, founded in 1650, was named for the wife of Cecil Baltimore, the second Lord Baltimore.

The county seat of Anne Arundel County is Annapolis, which was settled in 1649 by Puritans who had fled Virginia. They originally called their settlement Providence. The Puritan town successfully revolted against the Roman Catholic government of Maryland in the 1655 battle of the Severn River, but lost its independence after the English Restoration. In 1694 the settlement, which had come to be known as Anne Arundel Town, became the provincial capital of Maryland and was renamed Annapolis in honor of Princess Anne. As Queen Anne in 1708, she granted the town its first charter.

Too little too late, I guess. On Oct. 19, 1774, Annapolis staged its own Tea Party (seems to have been a fad). Once Philadelphia was occupied by the British, the Continental Congress met in Annapolis, making it the effective US capital (all major cities were under British control). Sir Robert Eden, the last royal governeur of Maryland, lies buried in the graveyard of St. Anne's Church in Annapolis; he was an ancestor of the British Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Today Annapolis is best known for the US Naval Academy, founded in 1845.

Annapolis became the state capital after independence. Information on the city is offered by The Mining Company and by Covesoft.

The largest city in Maryland is Baltimore. Further Maryland information in this glossary can also be found at the MD entry.

AACCA
The American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Advisors.

AACCCM
Anglo-American Cataloguing Committee for Cartographic Materials.

AACCP
Asociación Argentina Criadores de Caballos de Polo. `Argentine Association of Polo Pony Breeders.'

AACD
American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry. It's a member of the International Federation of Esthetic Dentistry, whose page for it explains that AACD ``is the largest international dental organization dedicated specifically to the art and science of cosmetic dentistry. Founded in 1984, the AACD has over 7600 members in the United States and in more than 60 countries around the globe. Members of the Academy include cosmetic and reconstructive dentists, dental laboratory technicians, corporations, educators, researchers, students, hygienists, and dental assistants.''

There's also an American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry. Go read the AAED entry. If you can figure out from that what the difference between aesthetic and cosmetic dentistry is, then you're a better man than I, unless you're a woman, in which case you're a better woman than I, even if you can't tell the difference (between aesthetic and cosmetic, of course).

AACDP
American Association of Chairs of Departments of Psychiatry.

AACE
American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. ``The Voice of Clinical Endocrinology® - Founded 1991.''

It reminds me of Einstein's comment about ``hormones of general circulation.''

AACE
AOBA Apartment Community Excellence (award).

AACI
Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel. An immigrants' support organization, founded 1951.

AACM
Afro-Asian Common Market. I found this in the New Japanese-English Dictionary of Economic Terms (The Oriental Economist, 1977). A search of the web suggests that this entity exists only as a vague proposal. The only web instances of the name where it was not clear that AACM does not exist were in Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries. At least the Japanese is consistent, using kanji for kyoudou shijou (`common market') and katakana transliterations for Asia and Africa (ajia and afurika). These are not ad hoc transliterations: the English words have been adopted in Japanese, but borrowings that have occurred recently (i.e., in the last few centuries) are written in the katakana syllabary (rather than in the hiragana syllabary used for native words). It's something like the use of italics in English to indicate young adoptions like naïve. A borderline case would be the word tempura, derived from Portuguese tempero (`spice, seasoning') in the sixteenth century and now sometimes written in hiragana. Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (Shogakukan) lists tempura (te-n-pu-ra) in katakana.

The same twenty-volume dictionary lists arigato (a-ri-ga-to-u, English: `thank you') in hiragana. There's a good reason for this. Although it is widely thought that arigato is a borrowing of the Portuguese obrigato (cognate of English 'obliged'), it clearly is not. There are recorded instances of arigato from before Portuguese contact, and the Japanese would more likely have been something like o-bu-ri-ga-to. In fact, the etymology of arigato is known, follows regular Grimm's-Law-type rules for Japanese, and is encoded in the two-kanji way of writing the word. (See the 2001 discussion on the Linguist List, summarized in this posting.)

Kyoudou (`common, general') is also written kyodo -- the o's are long, and in a strict version of the Hepburn system I think they require macrons. One of the girls' names that is transliterated Yoko is written with hiragana characters for yo-o-ko, but I've never seen it transliterated (as would be appropriate, just as with kyodo) as ``Youko.'' Probably too confusing.

Shijou (or shijo) has various of the noun senses of the English word market, but common market is also sometimes rendered by the somewhat pleonastic kyoudou doumei (doumei is `union, confederation').

AACN
American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

AACN
American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.

AACP
American Academy of Cardiovascular Perfusion. Visit the website to hear a medley of patriotic tunes.

AACP
American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists. ``The American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists was founded in 1975 by George Winokur MD and others (including many of his students). They shared the belief that a wealth of clinically relevant data is available in every psychiatrist's personal practice experience. The organization was created to provide a forum to share information for psychiatrists engaged in direct patient care; and to keep abreast of the latest scientific developments relevant to the practice of psychiatry.''

AACP
American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

AACP
American Association of Community Psychiatrists. Hey -- it takes a village. Okay, that was just a joke. Here's the official scoop: ``The Mission of AACP is to inspire, empower, and equip Community Psychiatrists to promote and provide quality care and to integrate practice with policies that improve the well being of individuals and communities.'' My gawd -- they really do want to treat the community!

AACR
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. This was not a single standard but at least two: an American and a British version. The current version (as of 2003) is AACR2R.

AACRAO
American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

AACR1
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 1st edition. This abbreviation started to be used when AACR2 appeared. As it is, each update lengthens the acronym: AACR, AACR2, AACR2R... Seems to me we're overdue for ``AACR2R+.''

AACR2
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition. Promulgated in 1978. The same acronym is widely used for AACR2R, a revised version of this.

AACR2R
Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition, 1988 revision, prepared under the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR; edited by Michael Gorman and Paul W. Winkler. (Ottawa: Canadian Library Association; London: Library Association; Chicago: American Library Association, 1988.) The current standard.

A very informative web page for a Monash University course explains:

``While the Editors are at pains to point out that it is not a 3rd Edition, some consider that it should have been called a 3rd Edition.''

AACR3
Not-so-fast there, dust boy!

AACSB
American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. Later officially ``AACSB -- International Association for Management Education.'' In March 2003 I learned that they're giving out the expansion ``Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.''

AACT
American Association of Community Theatre. (Sic.)

AACT
Apartment Association of Central Texas.

AACTE
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

AACU, AAC&U
Association of American Colleges and Universities. A generous source for empty educationist rhetoric. One of their projects is GEx.

From a faculty POV, this is an organization of administrative types who seek to wrest from faculty types the power to control curriculum, the method being to weaken and de-emphasize majors. So I've read, from third parties, anyway.

Hmmm, les'see here... I notice that the annual meeting of 2006 was held in conjunction with the American Conference of Academic Deans. The conference title was ``Demanding Excellence.''

To judge from its website and publications, the organization itself prefers the initialism with an ampersand. In unofficial contexts, others generally use plain AACU.

AACVB
Asian Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus.

AACVD
Aerosol-Assisted Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). Vide J. A. T. Norman and G. P. Pez, J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Comm., 971 (1991). Cf. Spray CVD: C. Roger, T. S. Corbitt, M. J. Hampden-Smith, T. T. Kodas, Appl. Phys. Lett. 65, 1021 (1994).

AAD
Access to Archival Databases. A nightmarishly badly catalogued ``system'' for retrieving files online from NARA, reportedly much better than the old alternatives, if you can imagine.

AAD
Allgemeiner Anlagedienst. (Germany.)

AAD
American Academy of Dermatology.

AAD
Analog-Analog-Digital. Audio CD's may be designated AAD, ADD, or DDD. The successive letters indicate analog or digital equipment was used in the respective stages of production: (1) original recording, (2) mixing and editing, (3) mastering (transcription).

AAD
Australian Association of the Deaf. ``The Australian Association of the Deaf Inc. is the national peak organisation for Deaf people in Australia. It represents the views of Deaf people who use Auslan (Australian Sign Language).''

AADA
Abbreviated Antibiotic Drug Application (to the FDA). As bacteria keep evolving greater immunity to existing antibiotics, we keep needing more new ones. Although bacteria reproduce asexually, they can exchange genetic material (this is relevant in attempts to trace the origin of diseases such as syphilis). Thus, immunity developed by one bacterium may spread to other bacteria. It is especially for this reason that long-term low-level administration of antibiotics to livestock as a growth enhancer is considered a dangerous incubator for immunity. Another use perceived to pose widespread risk is among drug addicts with tuberculosis (TB): TB has a long course, and someone not continuing to take antibiotics for the full term provides an opportunity for bacteria to evolve incremental increases in antibiotic resistance.

AADB
American Association of the Deaf-Blind.

AADE
American Association of Dental Editors. I really don't think you should put a comma after your canine.

AADE
American Association of Dental Examiners. Heck, I know how to do this. Open your mouth. Let me see...yes, yes, you have teeth. Founded in 1882, when this was probably a big deal. Now anyone can do it.

Mission Statement: ``To serve as a resource by providing a national forum for exchange, development and dissemination of information to assist dental regulatory boards with their obligation to protect the public.''

AADE
American Association of Diabetes Educators.

[column]

AADEC
Asociación Argentina de Estudios Clásicos. `Argentine Classical Studies Association.' A member of FIEC.

AADEP
American Academy of Disability Evaluating Physicians.

AADPRT
American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training. I imagine they didn't have to haggle to become owners of the <aadprt.org> domain.

AADS
American Association of Dental Schools. Now the ADEA.

AADT
Average Annual Daily Traffic. That's one official expansion, but it seems to mean the average daily traffic, determined by sampling or averaging over an entire year, which might be better expressed as Annual-Average Daily Traffic.

AAE
Affirmative Action Employer.

AAE
Alliance for Arts Education. Existed around 1976, anyway.

AAE
American Association of Endodontists. The E-word is calculated to minimize the terrifying thought of root-canal work.

AAEA
American Academy of Equine Art. They don't mean the art of being an equestrian.

AAEA
Alabama Art Education Association. ``[A] professional organization of art educators dedicated to advocating art education by following national standards, providing membership services, professional growth and leadership opportunities.''

AAEA
American Agricultural Economics Association.

AAEC
Advanced Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitor.

AAEC
AgChem Alliance for Electronic Communication. US and Canada agriculture-industry electronic-commerce action group. Working to put zebra codes on black-eyed peas, I think. The preponderance of web evidence suggests that the first A in AAEC stands for AgChem, but the successor organization's thumbnail history remembers it as just Ag.

The successor was RAPID, Inc. Details can be found quickly at our RAPID entry.

AAEC
Agricultur{e|al} and Applied EConomics. An academic department in some schools.

I visited the homepage of the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech in 2003 and was invited to join in celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary. Eagerly, I followed their link to a history of the department, divided into the first thirty years, and the second thirty years. Uh... Oh, of course, that document is from 1997. Umm... Ah, clarification (inferred from intimations on pages six and seven): the department was founded in 1921, so in 1996 began its seventy-fifth year. Almost. Actually, VT has probably had agricultural economics faculty since 1921 (one that year), and a list of ``Course Requirements for First B. S. Degree Program in Agricultural Economics'' survives from 1924, although there was only one student. It was apparently an optional curriculum within the School of Business Administration. In 1927, a Department of Agricultural Economics was finally established within the School of Agriculture. Documents celebrating the 75th anniversary were scheduled to remain on the website until April 5, 2004. (Ah, what the heck -- leave it up.)

I have to say that we are so used to thinking of education in formalized and institutionalized terms that it is often surprising to return to the beginning and see how loosely things initially came together. Often the most important conceptions and intentions of the initial participants, and basic facts about entities and members, are lost in the recycle bin of history. The history of universities and colleges generally, dating back to the schools in Paris and Bologna at the end of the twelfth century, are similarly uncertain.

The sixty-year history also explains subsequent department name changes:

In 1929, rural sociologists were added to the faculty, and the name was changed to the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology. The rural sociology faculty were transferred to the new Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1964, and the department's name was again changed to the Department of Agricultural Economics. To better describe the scope of department's work, the name was changed to the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in 1993.

So perhaps the ``Agriculture and'' form is an unofficial variant. Whatever.

TTU has a Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, also (as at VT) abbreviated in course offerings as AAEC.

UGA has one too. Oh no! They want us to celebrate their 75th anniversary too: ``The Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2004. Professor William Firor organized and chaired the department in 1929.'' Ahh -- now that's the way to do it. Everyone should have such foresight.

Okay, I think I've made my point by now, whatever it was.

Incidentally, I think in most places AAEC is called informally ``Ag Econ.''

AAEC
Australian Atomic Energy Commission. In 1986, the AAEC was formally replaced by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

AAEC
Avid-Authorized Education Centers. Avid Technology, Inc., offers ``Products for StoryTellers.'' It's so interesting that I'm sure you'll be happy to find out for yourself whatever it all is about.

AAED
American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry. A member of the International Federation of same (IFED, which it cofounded in 1994). According to IFED's page for AAED, ``[f]ounded in 1975, the American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry has members throughout the world. AAED's unique, multidisciplinary membership is comprised [sic, of course] of dentists in the following specialties: dental public health, endodontics, oral and maxiofacial surgery, orthodontics and dentofacial orthopedics, pediatric dentistry, periodontics and prosthodontics, along with general practitioners and certified dental technicians.'' Cf. AACD.

AAEE
Aeronautical and Aircraft Experimental Establishment. (British.)

AAEE
American Academy of Environmental Engineers.

AAEE
American Association for Employment in Education, Inc. They appear to be in favor of it.

Founded in 1934 as the National Institutional Teacher Placement Association. Teachers complain of lack of respect, but it doesn't help when the AAEE describes itself as ``comprised of colleges, universities, and school districts whose members are school personnel administrators and college and university career services officers.''

AAEE
American Association of Electromyography and Electrodiagnosis. Later became the AAEM.

AAEF
Aviation / Aerospace Education Foundation, Inc.

AAEI
American Association of Exporters & Importers. ``The national voice of the international trade community since 1921.''

AAEI
Australian Adult Entertainment Industry, Inc.

AAEM
American Academy of Emergency Medicine.

AAEM
American Academy of Environmental Medicine.

AAEM
American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine. Bzzzzzzzzzd-pop! Bzzzzzzzzzzd-pop! Used to be the ``American Association of Electromyography and Electrodiagnosis'' (AAEE). Here's a page served by an online exposition.

Whoops! AAEM namespace is gettin' ta be as crowdid as AAEE! In these hyar prairies, when you can see your neighbah's fahm, it's tahm to move on. Now they're AANEM.

AA/EOE
Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. This is probably equivalent to EO/AAE, but you better chant all the mantras, just to be sure no one sues the deep pockets off your sorry butt. (See the ADEA for a longer, safer, more ridiculous version.)

Couldn't they just say they obey the law? By pointing out that they obey these particular laws, aren't they implying that whether they obey other laws is a matter of discretion? Did you ever wonder what really would happen if the ob-AA/EOE or equivalent information were somehow omitted from an advertisement? The experiment has been performed! In the August 18, 1986, edition of C&EN (p. 63, center bottom), a help-wanted ad appeared that only described the qualifications sought and instructions for applying (by the following October 1). The vigilant AA apparatus of the employer (Arizona State University) sprang into action, managing to get the following emergency correction into the September 15 edition (p. 64, right bottom):

The advertisement for the position of MATERIALS TECHNICIAN in the ... which appeared in the Academic Positions Section of the August 18, 1986 issue of Chemical and Engineering News inadvertantly [sic] did not include the facts that Arizona State University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer and minorities are encouraged to apply. Application deadline extended to October 15, 1986 or until filled. Submit resume and 3 references to...

It is certainly true that the AA/EOE status of ASU is a ``fact'' distinct from the encouragement of minorities to apply. Still, the ability to deduce the latter fact from the former would not be surprising in someone with the required B.S. or M.S. degree in chemistry or a related field (let alone the ``highly desirable'' ``experience on the synthesis and characterization of solid state materials, including a working knowledge of crystal growth, vacuum system and inert atmosphere techniques'').

Okay, now for a pop quiz. Everyone loves a quiz! Here are two percentages: 3.0% and 4.4%. They represent the fraction of physicians who were black, based on the US censuses of 1960 and 1990. Here's the quiz question: which year had the lower percentage, 1960 or 1990? Think it over, take your time.

AAEP
American Association of Equine Practitioners. There's no longer a DNS listing for <aaep.org>. I'm worried. Have they gone the way of the AASP?

They're back! Yippee-aye-ayy!!! Cool horsehead-shaped yin-yang logo, too.

``The American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) is the world's largest professional association of equine veterinarians. The AAEP's mission is to improve the health and welfare of the horse, to further the professional development of its members, and to provide resources and leadership for the benefit of the equine industry.''

There's also an international association (IAEP). Donkeys still don't get any respect.

[column]

AAES
[Publications of] American Archaeological Expedition to Syria.

AAES
American Association of Engineering Societies.

AAET
Astrological Association of East Tennessee. ``Welcome, Fellow Seekers!''

AAETS
American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. Is that pronounced ``eats''? That's what I does when I is stressed. Or is it ``ates''? I wisheds they explaineds this -- it's beginning to freak me out!!!

``A multidisciplinary network of professionals who are committed to the advancement of intervention for survivors of trauma. The Academy aims to identify expertise among professionals, across disciplines, and to provide meaningful standards for those who regularly work with survivors. Today, the Academy's international membership includes individuals from over 200 professions in the health-related fields, emergency services, criminal justice, forensics, law, business and education. With members in every state of the United States and over 45 foreign countries, the Academy is now the largest organization of its kind in the world.''

(Is D.C. counted among states or foreign countries?)

AAETS defines traumatic stress as ``the emotional, cognitive and behavioral experience of individuals who are exposed to, or who witness, events that overwhelm their coping and problem-solving capabilities.''

Squaring the circle using only compass and straight-edge, finding the roots of a general quintic equation, expressing the indefinite integral of the Gaussian in closed form, finding a polynomial-time algorithm to solve a traveling-salesman problem, solving the quantum measurement problem, combining all four fundamental forces in a GUT. Oh yeah, I'm a survivor. (See Eric Zorn's report at the FLT entry.)

``Traumatic stress has many `faces.' In addition to the devastating effects of large-scale disasters and catastrophes, the Academy is committed to fostering a greater appreciation of the effects of day-to-day traumatic experiences (e.g., chronic illness, accidents, domestic violence and loss [and nonintegrability]). Our aim is to help all victims to become survivors and, ultimately, thrivers.''

AAF
Advanced Authoring Format. It's a ``multimedia file format that enables content creators to easily exchange digital media and metadata across platforms.'' So shouldn't that be the Advanced Co-authoring Format? It seems someone may have noticed the problem; during the first quarter or so of 2007, the AAF Association, Inc. (AAFA) became the AMWA (Advanced Media Workflow Association). Considering the groups involved, this seems to be of interest to television-related people and therefore almost inconceivably boring.

AAF
Affordable Art Fair. The idea is that no one should have to pay more than $5000 to have a nice piece of abstract, meaningless, pretentious crap to display at home. ``AF is the place for new and established collectors to discover and buy paintings, drawings, sculptures, video, photography and limited edition prints from distinguished galleries, all priced from $100 - $5000. This year [2007] the Fair will host more than 60 galleries with approximately a quarter of the exhibitors from Europe, Canada and South America.''

It is well known among artists that the way to get your work in the public eye and establish your name as you're starting out is to give your work away for free to established collectors. They then turn around and lend it for free to galleries. (Galleries would never display work that an artist tried to fob off on them directly. After all, curators have taste and perception, and one thing that just screams bad taste is giving it away for free.) That's one way the rich get richer and the poor poorer, but the real salt in the wound is that the poor have no place to display this ugly stuff except their own homes.

AAF
Alien Ant Farm. Their web pages advertise DVD's and talk about record labels and about being artists. I've never heard their stuff, but I'm sure it's music to some ears.

AAF
American Advertising Federation. They're trying to buy a good reputation. There ought to be money in flattering that vanity; check out their ``College Connection.''

Remember, the escape key turns off moving gifs (in Netscape, anyway).

They have

  1. ADDY awards,
  2. an Advertising Hall of Achievement, and
  3. an Advertising Hall of Shame, er, Fame.
If blots on the escutcheon are anything like those on ordinary cloth, these correspond to
  1. remove with water,
  2. remove with bleach,
  3. remove with scissors.

The Hall of Achievement is for those under forty, and the Hall of Shame is for those who are dead or soon will be (``[t]hose men and women who have completed their primary careers''). The Hall of Shame is unusually repulsive, as befits AAF.

``Upon induction into the Advertising Hall of Fame, each honoree receives a `Golden Ladder' trophy signifying membership in the Advertising Hall of Fame. This trophy, designed by the late Bill Bernbach, carries an inscription created by the late Tom Dillon, both of whom are members of the Hall of Fame.'' Both indeed.

The inscription: ``If we can see further, it is because we stand on the rungs of a ladder built by those who came before us.'' This inscription is a perfect epitome (epitomy) of advertising crassness. Firstly, because like typical advertising copy it is derivative. Specifically, it is derived from an expression that dates back at least to the twelfth century. The original form involves seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants (midgets seeing further in the standard versions). Secondly, because it is clumsy. (I'll come back later and express as elegantly as possible the inelegance of Dillon's locution. Now I have to move the computer.)

AAF
American Architectural Foundation. It ``educates individuals and communities about the power of architecture to transform lives and improve the places where we live, learn, work, and play.'' AAF has teamed with Target in ``Great Schools by Design,'' a ``national initiative to improve the quality of America's schools and communities.''

Target stores are right rectangular prisms with a minimum of windows or architectural interest. They make the average 1940's brick schoolhouse look like a cathedral. A common quick orientation to some engineering disciplines not unrelated to architecture: civil engineering makes targets, mechanical and aerospace engineering destroys them. The thought that this might not be a bad thing withal was expressed by John Betjeman in 1937, with Slough as the contemplated target. (This was not John Bunyan's parabolic Slough of Despond, but instead a hyperbolic Slough for desponding of in a real England.)

AAF
American Armoured Foundation, Inc. Why isn't that ``armored''? There's an AAF Tank Museum in Danville, Virginia; I'm not sure what the AAF comprises besides the museum.

AAFA
Advanced Authoring Format Association, Inc. Often partially abbreviated as ``AAF Association.'' During the first quarter of 2007, AAFA became the AMWA.

AAFA
Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

AAFC
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. AAC in French.

AAFC
All America Football Conference. A professional football league that operated for four seasons (1946-1949). Their teams included the Baltimore Colts (which only started up in 1947), (they replaced) the Miami Seahawks (which folded after one the first season), a Buffalo team that was known as the Bisons (1946) and (the first time the name was used by a pro football team) the Bills (1947-9), the Chicago Rockets (name changed to Hornets for 1949), Cleveland Browns, Los Angeles Dons, and the San Francisco Forty-Niners.

Two teams -- the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, took the names of existing local baseball teams (see Dodgers). What makes this unusually confusing is that there were just previously, or would soon be later, NFL teams with the same (or similar) baseball-team names. But first some general history...

With the end of the post-war boom in 1948, the AAFC could not sustain its battle with the NFL, and scrappy AAFC Commissioner Kessing -- I'm sorry, that was AAFC Commissioner Scrappy Kessing -- sought terms. At the end of the '49 season, the NFL merged-in three teams from the AAFC -- the Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts -- and held a special draft for players from the four other surviving AAFC teams.

The Colts francise folded after one season (1950) in the NFL and the 49ers endured many lean years, but the Browns, which had dominated the AAFC and won all four AAFC titles, went on to win the 1950 NFL title against the LA Rams (formerly of Cleveland) in Cleveland. Cleveland continued to be dominant in the NFL, though less overwhelmingly than in the AAFC.

Now about those NYC-area teams... The NFL's Brooklyn Dodgers changed name to the Tigers for 1944 (please don't ask me about Detroit) and merged with the Boston Yanks for 1945. The owner of the defunct NFL Brooklyn Dodgers/Tigers became a founder of the AAFC and owner of the AAFC Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946.

For 1946-1948, there were two AAFC teams in the five boroughs: the New York Yankees and the sorry Brooklyn Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team was eventually offered a chance to buy their ailing namesake but passed. For 1949, AAFC Dodgers merged with the stronger local AAFC team to become the Brooklyn-New York Yankees, the same year that the NFL's Boston Yanks moved and became the New York Bulldogs. With the folding of the AAFC, the Bulldogs changed their name back in 1950, becoming the New York Yanks.

It happens that the first regular-season game ever played by the San Francisco Forty-Niners (and the first played by a California pro football team) was a 21-17 loss to the (AAFC) New York Yankees in September 8, 1946. In 1950, with the AAFC Yankees defunct and many of the players distributed by draft to other NFL teams, the San Francisco Forty-Niners played their first regular season game in the NFL on September 17 -- a 21-17 loss to the New York Yanks.

The NFL's Yanks did poorly and were sold to a group in Dallas, where they failed by midseason (1951, I think) as the NFL's Texans. They stayed on the road for the rest of the season and went to Baltimore for 1952 to become the new Baltimore Colts. Don't hold me to the precise years, or names or anything, 'cause I just blew a brain gasket.

Someday when you're older and have plenty of spare RAM, I'll tell you about the White Soxes.

AAFCO
Association of American Feed Control Officials. I imagine that AAFCO does good work, whut-everrr it is, but all I can think of is like, gag me with a spoon!

AAFHV
American Association of Food Hygiene Veterinarians. It's ``an organization of veterinarians whose professional activities and interests encompass the many contributions of veterinary medicine to a hygienic food supply.'' Kill them and eat them, but keep it clean?

AAFHV is also ``the United States constituent of the World Association of Veterinary Food Hygienists; the only professional food hygiene group represented in the AVMA House of Delegates.'' The AVMA ``House of Delegates''? It sounds so 1776.

AAFP
American Academy of Family Physicians. They also offer a site with ``health information for the whole family.''

AAFP
American Academy of Fixed Prosthodontics. ``The Academy consists of over 500 specialists around the world, dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and competency in research, in teaching, and in the clinical practice of crown and bridge prosthodontics.'' Dentures.

AAFP
American Academy of Forensic Psychology.

AAFP
American Association of Feline Practitioners. They're veterinarians, not cat burglars.

AAFPRS
American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. You know, with a little nip here and a tuck there, I could make a much more attractive and youthful-looking acronym for you. It's not about vanity, you know: it's simply good business sense. Your organization name is the face you present to the world; you'd be amazed how a pretty face draws customers. It makes you wonder what you're really selling.

AAFTE
Average Annual Full-Time Equivalent (students registered). A SUNY-specific acronym, apparently. More are explained at the end of this document.

A.A.G.
Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis. Dutch `Department of Agrarian History.' See A.A.G. Bijdragen.

AAG
Association of American Geographers. Everyone agrees that it was founded in 1904 in Philadelphia, but no one explains why. Did it have to do with the San Francisco earthquake (1906), the Russian-Japanese war, Einstein's special theory of relativity?

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1941. ACLS has an overview.

AAGBI
Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland.

A.A.G. Bijdragen
A.A.G. Bijdragen. `[Department of Agrarian History] Contributions,' a journal published approximately annually by the A.A.G. (the department whose name is abbreviated in the journal title) at Wageningen UR. It's a monograph series, usually one per year, in Dutch (usually with an English summary).

AAGL
American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists. Publishes a journal.

AAGPBL
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. It iexisted from 1943 to 1954. It is now defunct. And if they were to bring it back now they wouldn't use the word girls.

AAGPBL PA
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players' Association. Not defunct.

AAGR
Average Annual Growth Rate.

AAGS
American Association of Geodetic Surveying. Member organization of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM).

[column]

AAH
Association of Ancient Historians. With members like Herodotus and Thucydides? No... historians of antiquity, not from it. You know, like tuna that tastes good, not tuna with good taste. There's a directory of Ancient Historians in the USA in Canada.

AAH
Australian Academy of Humanities.

AAHA
American Academy of Healthcare Attorneys. I'm hurt! Quick -- get me a personal injury lawyer! It's an emergency: call an ambulance chaser!

Phew! Okay, now that I'm convalescing I'll be needing a malpractice specialist.

AAHA
American Animal Hospital Association. (The link is to a website aimed mostly at veterinarians, with conference information and such. The AAHA also has a healthypet.com website with information for pet owners.)

AAHA
American Association of Homes for the Aging. Now AAHSA.

AAHABV, AAH-ABV
Association of Human-Animal Bond Veterinarians. It ``provides education, resources and support that enhance the ability of veterinarians to create a positive, and ethical relationship between people, animals, and their environment.'' When I visited in Jan. 2009, the homepage had a picture of someone in green scrubs and white lab jacket with one hand on the pet and one hand on the owner. ``Please add http://AAH-ABV.org to your list of favorite Web sites.''

AAHAM
American Association of Healthcare Administrative Management. Ah-- ahem, we'd like a word with you about your bill.

According to a partner organization, it ``is the premier professional organization in healthcare administrative management. AAHAM was founded in 1968 as the American Guild of Patient Account Management. Initially formed to serve the interests of hospital patient account managers, AAHAM has evolved into a national membership association that represents a broad-based constituency of healthcare professionals.''

AAHC
American Association for History and Computing.

AAHC
You say you wanted the Association of Academic Health Centers? That's the AHC.

AAHE
American Association for Health Education. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

AAHE
American Association for Higher Education. Take another drag if you're not high enough yet.

The AAHE has been described as ``kind of like the Association of American Colleges but with a higher pulse rate.'' Hmmm -- interesting metaphor. On March 24, 2005, AAHE Board of Directors announced that ``the Association will cease operations later this year.

In a statement to AAHE members, board chair Bernadine Chuck Fong, president of Foothill College, said, Despite vigorous efforts, president Clara M. Lovett and the board concluded that the organization no longer has the resources to continue its historic leadership role in higher education.

`The spirit of AAHE must and will continue,' said Dr. Lovett, adding that plans are under way to continue the Association's work in Assessment, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Electronic Portfolios, Campus Program, and other initiatives under the leadership of other associations and academic institutions. She said that discussions are already under way with the Lumina Foundation concerning relocation of the BEAMS (Building Engagement and Attainment of Minority Students) Project and with Heldref Publications, publisher of Change magazine. Since 1985, AAHE has provided editorial leadership for the magazine.''

AAHFRP
American Academy of Health, Fitness and Rehabilitation Professionals. Founded 1992 by Michael K. Jones, PhD, RPT, and Jeffrey Wright, RPT, gave a bunch of courses and granted a bunch of certifications up to at least 2004. However, sometime between then and April 2006, when I wrote this entry, it seems to have collapsed and died. Use it or lose it, I guess.

a.a.h.i.h.l.n.o.o.
As Always Hoping I Have Left No One Out. Traditional disclaimer following list of acknowledgments on David Meadows's sometimes-even-more-than-weekly Explorator. Meadows stopped using this abbreviation in Spring 2003, perhaps because of the angry controversy over whether it shouldn't be a.a.h.I.h.l.n.o.o. or a.a.h.i h.l.n.o.o. Cf. nitle.

AAHM
American Association for the History of Medicine. Founded in 1925, it is ``North America's oldest continuously functioning scholarly organization devoted to the study of all aspects of the history of the health professions, disease, public health, and related subjects. It ... comprise[s] ... professional historians, practicing health professionals, librarians and archivists in the history of the health sciences, graduate students and students actively seeking professional degrees.''

James Simon Kunen's The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (Random House, 1968) is about the author's experiences at Columbia University, which in those days was also known as Guerrilla U. It includes the author's parody of a literary analysis of a very short poem, reproduced in its entirety here: ``Them? / Ahem!''

AAHPERD
American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, Dance, Dance!

(Okay, just kidding.)

AAHPM
American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. The former AHP.

AAHPSSS
Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. Also A2HPS3. The website looks authentically historical -- it was last modified in 1997 and has links to the 1994 and 1995 newsletters. I guess it's a shoestring organization like ours. Here's a little comradely advice: lose some unproductive letters. We started out with grandiose plans, as the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve. People would stop us at Burger King to ask us how to pronounce the name (``an gimme fries wit dat, too''). We weren't turning a profit, so we had to let a lot of characters go; we kept only the most initial ones, the ones up front, the profit-centers. Now we're SBF -- efficient. We still can't seem to turn a profit, though. I think the flaw in our business plan may be that we don't charge anybody for anything, but we can't afford an accountant to tell us for sure.

AAHS
American Association for Hand Surgery.

AAHSA
American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging. Previously known as AAHA.

AAHSL
Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries.

AAHSLD
Association of Academic Health Sciences Library Directors.

AAI
Alfred Adler Institut Düsseldorf.

AAI
American Association of Immunologists.

AAI
Arab American Institute. No hyphen. ``[A] non-profit, nonpartisan national leadership organization for Americans of Arab descent who are interested in the democratic process.''

AAIA
Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association.

AAICU
Alabama Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. (I hope that's pronounced ``Aye, aye! Coup. But I'm not going to make any effort to find out if it is, because it probably isn't.) A/k/a Alabama Independent Colleges. AAICU is an affiliate of NAICU. Surprised? You shouldn't be. AAICU seems to be growing briskly. When I read the homepage they had six members, and by the time the ``Member Institutions'' link had loaded, they had 14. (It wasn't a long wait, okay? I've got DSL.)

One of their members is the United States Sports Academy (USSA).

AAID
American Academy of Implant Dentistry. ``Dental implants are substitutes for the roots of missing teeth. They act as an anchor for a replacement tooth or crown or a set of replacement teeth.''

AAII
American Association of Individual Investors.

AAIM
Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine. It ``consists of the Association of Professors of Medicine (APM), the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM), the Association of Subspecialty Professors (ASP), the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM), and the Administrators of Internal Medicine (AIM).''

AAIM
American Academy of Insurance Medicine.

AAIM
Asociación Argentina de Informática Médica.

AAIM
Association for Applied Interactive Multimedia.

AAIT
Atlanta Association of Interpreters and Translators. The Georgia chapter of the American Translators Association.

AAJ
American Association for Justice. Not to be confused with the Justice League of America. The JLA defends the innocent while wearing colorful tights; the AAJ defends anyone while wearing Brooks Brothers suits or similarly colorful attire. The AAJ is a rebranding of the American Trial Lawyers Association.

AAL
AfroAsiatic { Languages | Linguistics }.

AAL
Aid Association for Lutherans.

AAL
ATM Adaptation Layer. The layer of electronics closest to the sender or receiver. It chops up voice, data, image, video, whatnot data into 48-byte packets of information and passes them to the ATM layer, which slaps on a 5-byte header to produce 53-byte cells. AAL also performs the reverse procedure (generating audio, video, etc. from packetized data).

The AAL is divided into an upper sublayer called a convergence sublayer (CS) and a lower sublayer called SAR for segmentation and reassembly.

AAL uses different protocols for different kinds of data. See AAL1 through AAL5.

aal
A shrub found in the East Indies (according to OSPD4) and in the Scrabble tablelands. The plural form is aals.

Aal
German word for `eel.' (Masculine by default; plural form `Aale.')

AALAS
American Association for Laboratory Animal Science. Organized as the Animal Care Panel (ACP) in 1950, took current name in 1967. A professional, nonprofit association of people and institutions ``concerned with the production [I like that word], care and study of laboratory animals [per se].''

AALC, AALCT
Amphibious Assault Landing Craft.

AALE
American Academy for Liberal Education. You can join for a mere US$3000, but you have to be an institution.

aalii
A tree found in the tropics and in the vowel-rich soils of the Scrabble forest, which is seeded with as many A's as I's (nine of each). The plural form is aaliis.

AALL
American Association of Law Libraries.

AALPDU
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) Protocol Data Unit.

AALR
American Association for Leisure and Recreation. One of six national associations within the AAHPERD.

AALS
Association of American Law Schools. Founded 1900. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1958. ACLS has an overview.

AALS
Association of American Library Schools. Read this in a 1976 item; it may not be current.

AALSA
Asian American Law Students Association at UB.

AAL1
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) type 1. Protocol standard for constant bit rate (CBR) traffic like audio and video, and for emulation of TDM-based circuits such as DS-1 and E-1.

AAL2
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) type 2. Protocol standard for supporting real-time VBR communications -- i.e., connection-oriented traffic, a/k/a streaming audio and video.

AAL3/4
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) type 3 and 4. Protocol standard that upports both real-time and non-real-time VBR, as well as SMDS.

AAL5
ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL) type 5.

AAM
Air-to-Air Missile.

AAM
Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers. They go by ``Auto Alliance'' for short, but others use AAM for shorter. The AAM, founded in January 1999, is the successor of AAMA, which was disbanded at the end of 1999. The Washington office closed its doors for the last time on New Year's Eve. The AAMA had been a trade association of American car manufacturers for 98 years, and after Chrysler Corp. was acquired by Daimler-Benz AG in 1999, the two remaining members -- GM and Ford -- quickly decided to replace it with a new organization.

The trade group was initially being bankrolled largely by six members with full voting rights: General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen. (``Industry maverick'' Honda rejected overtures to join the new alliance.) BMW, Volvo, and Mazda would participate in meetings and discussions as associate members. Membership has varied a little bit. By January 2001, FIAT, Isuzu, Mitsubishi, and Porsche had joined.

Here's a nice correct use of the verb comprise, from the alliance's about page (browsed in July 2007; lower-cased for readability): ``The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is a trade association of 9 car and light truck manufacturers including BMW Group, DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mazda, Mitsubishi Motors, Porsche, Toyota and Volkswagen.'' Oh sorry, that was just an odd use of the verb include.

(As of July 2007, ``DaimlerChrysler'' was correct. The previous May, an affiliate of the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., New York, agreed to buy an 80.1% equity interest in a future new company, Chrysler Holding LLC, with DaimlerChrysler to hold a 19.9% equity interest in the new company. The closing of the transaction took place on August 3, 2007. It may take a couple of months for the various name changes to become official. DaimlerCrysler is to be renamed Daimler AG, and while its stock ticker symbol on the NYSE and the DAX-30 is set to change to DAI on August 9, the name change has to be approved by a shareholder meeting on October 4.)

AAM
American Association of Museums. Holds its annual meeting in May.

AAM
American Axle & Manufacturing Inc. GM manufacturing facilities in Saginaw, New York (in the Buffalo area), which were spun off as a separate entity in 1994.

In February 1997, negotiations between the new management and the UAW went to the eleventh hour, eventually settling on wage and bonus terms similar to the union's pact with GM, with wages to rise to $25/hr in the third year of the agreement. At the time, industry analysts said the agreement would put American Axle at a substantial cost disadvantage relative to other component makers.

Nevertheless, in September 1997, AAM announced a deal to sell a majority stake to the Blackstone Group, a New York-based investment group. American Axle concentrates on components for rear-drive vehicles and makes axles for nearly all GM trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUV) produced in North America, and that sector was booming even as car sales declined.

AAMA
American Automobile Manufacturers' Association. I visited their website some time after Chrysler was bought by Daimler-Benz and it looked pretty moribund. For details, see the entry for the AAM (the successor organization). The AAMA was itself the successor or renaming of the MVMA.

AAMA
Architectural Aluminum Manufacturers' Association.

AAMC
Association of American Medical Colleges.

AAMI
Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation.

AAMN
American Assembly for Men in Nursing. ``Assembly''? Sounds like high school. ``The purpose of AAMN is to provide a framework for nurses as a group to meet, discuss, and influence factors which affect men as nurses.
Membership is open to any nurse -- male or female -- to better facilitate discussion and to meet the most important objective of AAMN -- strengthening and humanizing health care.''

AAMOF, aamof
As A Matter Of Fact. (Treated as a word when written in lower case, so first letter is capitalized at beginning of a sentence.) Cf. more careful AFAIK.

AAMOI
As A Matter Of Interest. But is it a fact?

AAMRL
American Association of Medical Record Librarians. Once the name of an organization founded as the Association of Record Librarians of North America (ARLNA, q.v.).

AAMSI
American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics.

AAMU
Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. The campus is in Normal.

AAN
Action for Animals Network.

AAN
American Academy of Neurology.

AAN
American Academy of Nursing.

AAN
Army After Next. Some speculative exercises conducted by the US Army in 1998, intended to explore possible future issues in a different sort of next war than we eventually got.

AAN
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

AAN
Atti della Accademia di Scienze morali e politiche della Società nazionale di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti di Napoli, Napoli.

AANA
American Association of Nurse Anesthetists.

AANA
Arthroscopy Association of North America.

AANEM
American Association of Neuromuscular and Electrodiagnostic Medicine. Used to be the ``American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine'' (AAEM).

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AANLS
American Association for Neo-Latin Studies. ``The purpose of the AANLS is to promote the study and teaching of Latin and Latin-language literature in their Neo-Latin manifestations, from the beginning of Italian humanism until the present day. Despite [the SBF glossarist would write ``because of'' here] the sheer size, [but despite the] importance, and longevity of this body of texts, much Neo-Latin literature remains overlooked and in acute need of every kind of scholarly attention, including basic inventorying and editing of texts; application of critical methods old and new; up-to-date translations for a wide audience; and cross-disciplinary linkage of these texts to the variety of fields for which they constitute valuable evidence, including the physical and social sciences as well as the humanities.''

I am reminded of ``Neo-Spanish,'' which is discussed at the 40 entry.

AANP
American Association of Naturopathic Physicians. (``Naturopathic physicians'' are ``N.D.'s.'')

AANP
American Association of Nurse Practitioners.

AANR
American Association for Nude Recreation. Based in Kissimmee, Florida. (Website design by Captain Jack Communications.)

AAO
Alberta Association of Optometrists.

a. a. O.
German, am angegebenen Ort or am angeführten Ort, `at the place given' or `at the place indicated': loc. cit. This glossary has an entry for this Ort.

AAO
American Academy of Ophthalmology. ``The Eye M.D. Association.''

AAO
American Academy of Optometry.

AAO
American Association of Orthodontists.

AAO
American Academy of Osteopathy. Promotes or promoted the concept of cranial therapy. Listed on Quackwatch's page of ``Questionable Organizations.''

AAO
American Academy of Optometry.

AAO
American Association of Orthodontists. Oh, man! It's a traffic jam of medical specialties with AAO abbreviations!

AAO
Anglo-Australian Observatory. Consists of the 3.9 meter Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) and the 1.2 meter UK Schmidt Telescope (UKST) on Siding Spring Mountain, outside Coonabarabran, NSW; and a laboratory in the Sydney, Australia, suburb of Epping. Funding by Australian and British governments.

AAOA
American Academy of Otolaryngic Allergy. Promotes or promoted the concept of clinical ecology. Listed on Quackwatch's page of ``Questionable Organizations.''

AAODC
American Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors. Also went by the initialism ODC; changed its name in 1972 to become the IADC, q.v.

AAOFAS
American Association of Orthopaedic [sic] Foot & Ankle Surgeons.

AAO-HNS
American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. Ah--Oww! You know, I don't like the way that initialism looks. It's strangely articulated. No, no -- don't move it! Lie perfectly still! We'll get a spinal professional to look at it very soon.

AAOS
American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Founded in 1933. ``[T]he preeminent provider of musculoskeletal education to orthopaedic surgeons and others in the world.''

AAOS
American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Founded in 1997 by the board of directors of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. A Washington, D.C., lobby for that other AAOS. There's also a PAC, founded in 1999.

AAP
Academy of American Poets. (No, no, not the ``American Academy of Poets'' -- there is no such organization.) They don't call themselves the ``AAP'' -- it's not poetical; they call themselves ``the Academy.'' I've just placed the entry here for sensible people. Sensible people probably also want to know what the AAP does. The AAP promotes public appreciation of poetry. They do this by paying audiences so that poets don't have to read to empty rooms. (I guess I better admit right away that the previous sentence is a joke; it's pretty believable, and loosely speaking it's probably true, so you shouldn't feel embarrassed or inadequate or downright imbecilic if you didn't see that it was an obvious joke. There, there, now -- it's alright, gimme a big smile!)

The AAP sponsors NPM.

AAP
American Academy of Pediatrics.

AAP
American Academy of Periodontology. We actually have a tiny bit of additional information about the AAP at this PI entry.

AAP
Applications Access Point.

AAP
Asian Academy of Prosthodontics. The organization name is prominently (i.e., in the window title of all its pages) misspelled (``Prosthtodoctic'') at its website as of November 24, 2008. Isn't prosthodontics all about looking good?

AAP
Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. See AJP.

AAP
Association of Academic Psychiatry.

AAP
Association of American Physicians.

AAP
Association of American Publishers, Inc. About three hundred member publishers, as of late 2002. Pat Schroeder represented Colorado in the US House of Representatives (D-CO1: Denver) from 1973 to 1996. After a brief stint at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, she became president of the AAP in June 1997. She still holds that position in 2007.

AAP
Atti dell'Accademia Pontiana, Napoli.

AAP
Australasian Association for Philosophy. AAP(NZ) is its New Zealand Division.

AAP
Australian Associated Press. Australia's national news agency, founded um, in 1940 or a bit before. Most Australian news is sourced from AAP. In addition to national, regional, and local general news from Australia, there's significant coverage of company developments through its press release service.

AAPA
American Academy of Physician Assistants.

AAPA
American Association of Port Authorities. An ``alliance of leading ports in the Western Hemisphere [that] protects and advances the common interests of its diverse members as they connect their communities with the global transportation system.''

``Diverse'' is a general-purpose word meaning ``it's all good.''

AAPA
American Association of Psychiatric Administrators.

AAPA
Asian American Psychological Association. ``The AAPA was formed to advance the welfare of Asian Americans through the development of Asian American psychology.''

AAPC
American Academy of Professional Coders. The Academy ``was founded in an effort to elevate the standards of medical coding by providing ongoing education, certification, networking and recognition.''

AAPCC
American Association of Poison Control Centers. Visit now and learn the number of a poison control center near (or maybe not so near) you.

AAPD
American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry.

AAPD
American Association of People with Disabilities. According to JFA, the AAPD is ``the largest national nonprofit cross-disability member organization in the United States [you wonder how far you can loosen the multiple qualifications and preserve the truth value of this statement; AAPD's self-description scratches the national but adds nonpartisan], dedicated to ensuring economic self-sufficiency and political empowerment for the more than 56 million Americans with disabilities. [Almost one in five? Is this mostly the elderly popsulation, or are they just counting extreme stupidity as a disability?] AAPD works in coalition with other disability organizations for the full implementation and enforcement of disability nondiscrimination laws, particularly the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.''

I remember in Mr. Warnock's ninth-grade Geometry class, how often when I would make a clarifying observation, there would be a commotion and a feverish scrawling, and with some ceremony a condisciple would soon present me with an ``Al Kriman Award.'' Judy was one of the more frequent presenters. She went on to be a TV news producer. I believe the award was in recognition of my obscurity, but neither I nor anyone else can recall any of my award-winning words. Eventually, someone who was also taking Print Shop printed up a tear-off stack of Al Kriman Awards with blue sans-serif lettering. It was a somewhat unruly class. Mr. Warnock used to plead wearily (not to me in particular, I think) ``you don't have to listen, but PLEASE SHUT UP!'' I don't think I ever gave a very long acceptance speech. I always thought it was peculiar to receive an honor named after oneself, but according to the program for AAPD's 2004 Leadership Gala, ``AAPD will also present the first-ever Linda Chavez-Thompson Award to Linda Chavez-Thompson, in recognition of her longstanding leadership towards inclusion of people with disabilities and their families within the labor movement.''

AAPD
Asian Academy of Preventive Dentistry.

AAPG
American Association of Petroleum Geologists. See also the Society of Petroleum Engineers.

AAPhA
Abstracts (of papers delivered at the annual meeting of the) American PHilological Association. The APA photocopies and sells them at the meeting. Surprisingly, these informal publications are indexed by APh. Or maybe not so surprisingly, as the abstracts are refereed to select speakers.

AAPHV
American Association of Public Health Veterinarians. Some years ago, the AAPHV had a page hosted by the AVMA. Today (early 2009), its page is hosted by the ACVPM. It looks just a wee bit inactive, to judge from web presence.

AAPI
Association d'Aide aux Personnes Incontinentes. I don't think I'm going to translate this. I mean -- I could do, I want to, I'm aching to, but I can hold it in.

AAPI
Audio Applications Programming Interface.

AAPM
American Academy of Pain Management. I don't know what you do, but sometimes when I try to walk on a strained tendon, I like to chew on my shoulder.

AAPM
American Academy of Pain Medicine.

AAPM
American Association of Physicists in Medicine. ``Adheres'' to the IOMP. That sounds vaguely unsanitary; I guess a word was wanted that wouldn't imply that AAPM was somehow subordinate to, subsumed under, or in any other way sub to the IOMP. I guess ``affiliated'' was tainted by its etymology (Latin filius, -i, masc., meaning `son'). Still, the IOMP doesn't claim to be an adhering organization of the AAPM. Would ``associated'' have implied too much independence?

In the context of associations, the word adhere is often used in the sense of conform to a rule or convention.

Cf. ACMP.

AAPOR
American Association for Public Opinion Research.

AAPP
AAP Pleonasm.

AAPP
Association for the Advancement of Philosophy & Psychiatry. It ``was established in 1989 to promote cross-disciplinary research in the philosophical aspects of psychiatry and to support educational initiatives and graduate training programs.'' (The URL looks impermanent. You may have to do a search.) ``Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology (PPP) is the official journal of the organization, published in conjunction with the Royal College of Psychiatrists Philosophy Group by The Johns Hopkins University Press.'' You know, stuttering is listed among p-p-p-psychological and behavioral disorders in ICD-10 (the code is F98.5). Let's think deeppp thoughts about this.

a.-a.p. pleonasm
Abbreviation-Assisted Pleonasm pleonasm. Plural form: a.-a.p.p. pleonasms. Implicitly refers to abbreviations that are not also acronyms or initialisms that have honorary acronym status. Pretty rare, compared to the AAP pleonasm, and even in absolute terms. So far, in fact, we've only noticed ``UK and Northern Ireland'' (``short'' for ``the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland''). If we notice another, we'll start introducing ugly and stupid variant plural forms like ``a.a.-a.a.p.p. pleonasmses.'' Don't tell me that would be ugly, stupid, or redundant, redundantly so or not.

AAP pleonasm
Acronym-Assisted Pleonasm PLEONASM.
    Here are some of the most popular, according to the latest updated rankings of an authoritative local study group:
  1. PIN number.
  2. VIN number.
  3. UPC code.
  4. HIV virus.
  5. ATM machine.
  6. MIDI interface.
  7. GUI Interface.
  8. Cisco Ccie.
  9. ABS System.
  10. or OBO.
  11. ABS Braking System. (What is it? A sense of déjà vu? You think this entry is...redundant?)
  12. CableACE Awards.
  13. PILOT payment.
  14. Saab AB.
  15. VCH Verlag; Wiley-VCH Verlag.
  16. MOSFET transistor.
  17. HRL Laboratories (or Labs).
  18. ECL logic.
  19. FET transistor.
  20. HARM missile.
  21. BTU unit[s]
  22. IUPUI (strictly speaking, this is an acronym with built-in pleonasm).
  23. BJT transistor. Has lost a lot of ground to MOSFET's, even to JFET's.
  24. For FPO.
  25. RTL level.
  26. FRED diode.
  27. TTP program.
  28. Software ISV.
  29. OT Topic.
  30. YELT Test.
  31. MECL logic. Very obsolete technology.

Deserving of special recogition is the extravagantly redundant BUILT Informationstechnologie AG.

First-runner-up: LIRA-Lab, apparently also an official pleonasm.

Honorable Mention: ``The NAVE Virtual Environment'' An AAP pleonasm constructed from a XARA.

Repeated, reckless use of AAP pleonasms is PNS Syndrome. If acronym AAP pleonasm is a problem, then perhaps sometimes XARA's are the solution. Indeed, if ``Acronym-assisted AAP Pleonasm'' were the expansion of AAP (it isn't, I think), then AAP itself would be a XARA. Look, just follow the link, already!

What, still here? Feeling sympathetically contrarian? See the false pleonasm entry.

AAPPSPA
American Academy of Private Practice in Speech Pathology and Audiology. I'd like to say something about the name of this organization, but I just can't seem to get the words out of my mouth.

AAPS
American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. Looks like a third declension. I guess aapem would be the accusative singular form. Sounds pretty aggressive, too.

AAPS
American Association of Physician Specialists.

AAPS
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. ``A Voice for Private Physicians Since 1943.'' Oh cool -- they have a motto in, uh, looks like Greek to me: ``Omnia pro aegroto.''

AAPT
American Association of Philosophy Teachers. As of mid-September, all the au courant web sites link to the URL given here (http://aapt-online.dhs.org/aapt.html), but the Australian domain on which it resided professes ignorance, or nescience, or agnosticism on AAPT ontology.

AAPT
American Association of Physics Teachers. Based in College Park, Maryland, at the famous address One Physics Ellipse.

AAR
Airport { Acceptance | Arrival } Rate. The amount of incoming traffic an airport is deemed capable of accepting. Normally stated as number of arrivals per hour.

AAR
American Academy of Religion, founded 1957. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1979. ACLS has an overview.

Begun as the Association of Biblical Instructors in American Colleges and Secondary Schools, it changed name in December 1922 to National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI). The name was favored in part because nabi is Hebrew for `prophet.' Personally, I would distinguish between a biblical instructor like Samuel or Isaiah, say, and a Bible instructor like Ismar J. Peritz of Syracuse University, who conceived the idea of the modern organization in 1909. The current name was adopted in 1964.

AAR is closely associated with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).

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AAR
American Academy in Rome.

AAR
Association of (North) American Railroads.

AAR
Association of Authors' Representatives. A nonprofit ``organization of independent literary and dramatic agents.'' Among the requirements to join is two years in the business of being an agent.

The central reality to be understood here is that there is a large pool of frustrated wannabe-published hacks. Note the hyphen: they are hacks, what they want to be is published. Perhaps they've already had their manuscripts rejected by a few or a few dozen publishers. The cream of the crud may have had a few helpful criticisms in reply, but usually the assistant editor charged with processing the slush pile has read and discarded it on the basis of one or two paragraphs, and isn't going to bother attempting to educate the hopelessly ineducable. Many ``unpublished authors'' get the idea, or are mischievously given it, that their problem started at the transom, whereas really it started at the keyboard. Specifically, PEBCAK.

The comforting idea is that you need an ``in'' with the publishers -- a clubby, exclusive bunch consistent with your fantasies of the glamour of the publishing universe. The agent is your ``in.'' This delusion creates an opportunity for scam artists, who promise eventual publication and charge fees that are ultimately their main source of income. Reading fees, evaluation fees, marketing fees, office expenses, travel expenses, submission fees, shmooze-with-editors-at-expensive-French-restaurant expenses, etc. The SFWA has a nice long informative page on not getting stiffed. Damn! I wish I'd read that first! The AAR and similar organizations play a useful self-policing role for the agenting industry, by establishing codes of conduct which assure that their members, at least, are dealing honestly.

The AAR's code of ethics is called ``the Canon of Ethics.'' Similar organizations are the AAA in the UK (with a ``Code of Practice''), NZALA in New Zealand (``Code of Behaviour''), and AALA in Australia (just starting up as of this writing: founded in 2002; ``Code of Practice'' still in draft form). Canadian literary agents listed (not necessarily recommended) by TWUC do not list any AAR- or AAA-like memberships, and I'm not aware that the relevant laws in Canada are considerably stronger than in other English-speaking countries.

I know one fellow who submitted his novel (directly -- without an agent) to only a dozen or a score of publishers and actually got a nibble. The house sent the novel to two, then two more, and finally another two outside readers for review. (Maybe it was just the first chapter; I forget.) The first four, and one of the last two, liked it. Once they got a don't-like-it from a reader, they rejected it. The author never received any specific comments on the work. This all doesn't strike me as the most efficient way to do business, but maybe they're just a front or something. I guess you need an agent. (For an alternative approach, read this AAF entry.)

AAR
Automatic Alternative (communication) Routing.

AARA
Air-Air Refueling Area.

AARC
Alcohol and Addictions Resource Center. From the name, you'd guess it was a city park. But I guess they don't mean that kind of resource. AARC is based in South Bend and, um, serves Michiana.

AARHMS, aarhms
The American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spam. I didn't even know there was Spam in the middle ages. Oh wait -- that's the ``American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain.'' Sorry, my error.

Aarhms maintains a site called LIBRO.

AARN
Alberta Association of Registered Nurses.

AARN
Association for Australian Rural Nurses.

AARP
American Association of Retired Persons. You are welcome to join at age 50. Some pronounce AARP like Cockney `harp.'

In the movie Absolute Power (1997), Clint Eastwood, in the role of an aging thief (Luther Whitney), says

Go down a rope in the middle of the night? If I could do that, I'd be the star of my AARP meetings.

Generations hence, multimedia audiences will marvel at the many-layered subtlety of today's golden age of dialogue. Cf. VCR entry.

It turns out that AARP no longer stands for ``American Association of Retired Persons.'' It's just a name now, it doesn't stand for anything, okay? (Cf. ATA.)

In January 2005, accepting his New York Film Critics award for Best Director (for ``Million Dollar Baby'') Eastwood commented that ``Outside of the AARP sticker on my trailer, I'm no different than any other director.'' He needs to retire his gag writer.

AARP
Appletalk Address Resolution Protocol (ARP).

AAS
African Academy of Sciences.

AAS
American Antiquarian Society. More than a century passed between their foundation (1812) and their becoming a constituent society of the ACLS (1919). Impressive that they're always ``in character.'' (Similarly, their internet site was one of the last sites serving gopher protocol.)

ACLS has an overview, according to which their principal activity is ``[m]aintenance of a national research library [ (hours) (directions by horseless buggy) ] focusing on all aspects of American history and culture through 1876.''

AAS says it ``specializes in the American period to 1877, and holds two-thirds of the total pieces known to have been printed in this country between 1640 and 1821, as well as the most useful source materials and reference works printed since that period. Its files of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American newspapers, numbering two million issues, are the finest anywhere.''

Also: ``AAS is the third oldest historical society in this country and the first to be national rather than regional in its purpose and in the scope of its collections.''

AAS
American Association of Suicidology. At least when they bury this tragic neologism, it won't be in the churchyard.

AAS
American Astronomical Society.

AAS
American Astronautical Society. Something else again. They're concerned with putting intelligent life in nearby outer space, whether or not there's any out there already.

AAS
American Auditory Society. ``The American Audiology Society was formed in October, 1974. In June, 1978, after a vote by the members of the Society, the name was changed to the American Auditory Society.'' (Did they vote in favor of it?)

AAS
Angle-Angle-Side. (If triangles have two corresponding angles and one corresponding side equal in measure, then the two triangles are congruent.) Also ASA, and given the number of geometry books that have been written, probably SAA as well. Cf. SAS and SSS.

AAS
Association for Asian Studies, founded 1941, as publisher of the Far Eastern Quarterly (now the Journal of Asian Studies). Talk about getting in on the ground floor -- 1941 was the year that the Japanese Empire went to war against the United States. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1954. ACLS has an overview.

AAS
Atomic Absorption Spectro{ scopy | photomet{er|try} }. Often just `AA.'

Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech (VT).

AAS
Australian Academy of Science.

AAs, AA's
Author's AlterationS. In principle, and even occasionally in practice, there may be just a singular alteration, but the difference between AAs and AA is one of grammatical number: AA tends to be construed singular.

AAS
Acrylonitrile/Acrylic elastomer/Styrene terpolymer. (Read ``acrylic elastomer'' as a single term, or just ignore ``elastomer.'') AAS resin was developed to improve the weatherability of ABS resin (butadiene elastomer).
AASA
American Association of School Administrators. Meets annually at the National Conference on Education held each February.

AASCU
American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

AASH
American Association for the Study of Headache. But not tonight. Or ever again -- they changed the name to American Headache Society (AHS).

AASHO
American Association of State Highway Officials. Founded on December 12, 1914, it inserted ``and Transportation'' (to become AASHTO) in November 13, 1973.

AASHTO
American Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials. See also AASHO.

AASL
American Association of School Librarians. A division of the ALA.

AASLD
American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.

Related entries: ADHF, ALF.

AASLH
American Association for State and Local History. Boy, did I ever have this entry garbled. Among the organization's publications is a quarterly magazine called History News and a monthly newsletter with job listings, called Dispatch. It's an affiliated society of the AHA.

AASM
American Academy of Sleep Medicine. I think this must have had a name like ``American Sleep Disorders Association''; its domain is <asda.org>.

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AASOR
Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research. This is the signature series of ASOR, a book series that began in 1919 (first volume appear 1920). Despite the name, publication has not always been very precisely periodical, although volumes did come out annually from 1992 to 2000 (AASOR 50-57); AASOR 60 has copyright year 2005.

ASOR has two other book series as well as various periodicals: a bulletin (BASOR), Near Eastern Archaeology (NEA), and the ASOR Newsletter (all quarterlies) as well as an annual Journal of Cuneiform Studies (JCS).

AASOR's editorial offices were originally (I believe) in New Haven, Conn., and later (through the 1970's) in Cambridge, Mass. From the 1980's through 1992, the series was published by Eisenbrauns. (This is a small academic press based in Winona Lake, Indiana. Founded by Jim Eisenbraun in 1975, it specializes in ancient Near Eastern studies, archaeology, Assyriology, and biblical studies.) From 1993 the series was with Scholars Press in Atlanta, Georgia (i.e., at Emory University, mentioned at this S.P.D. entry). We all know what happened to Scholars Press at the end of 1999, but since 1998 AASOR has been based at Boston University and published by David Brown Book Co.

AAS oscillations
Al'tshuler, Aronov, Spivak OSCILLATIONS. Oscillations in transport properties that are periodic in one-half of a flux quantum: Øo/2 = h/2e , observed in low-temperature transport in both metals and semiconductors, where conduction can take alternative paths that enclose magnetic flux.

Theoretical explanation in terms of weak localization is associated with alternating destructive and constructive interference of time-reversed scattering paths of individual diffusing electrons. (The paths are only approximately time-reversed, because magnetic field breaks the invariance. This becomes an issue at larger fields.)

Theoretical paper: B. L. Al'tshuler, A. G. Aronov, and B. Z. Spivak, Pis'ma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 33, 101 (1981) [JETP Lett. 33, 94 (1981)].

Experimental paper: D. Yu. Sharvin and Yu. V. Sharvin, Pis'ma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 34, 285 (1981) [JETP Lett. 34, 272 (1981)].

AASP
American Association for Single People. Also called ``Unmarried America.'' Or possibly not: ``Unmarried America is the membership division of Spectrum Institute (also known as the American Association for Single People).''

``Unmarried America engages in education and advocacy for America's 86 million unmarried adults. Our group includes people who are ever-single, divorced, or widowed, and who have a variety of living arrangements (solo singles, single parents, domestic partners, roommates, and unmarried families). We are seeking fairness for unmarried employees, consumers, and taxpayers as well as more recognition of unmarried voters.''

I guess ``ever-single'' is a euphemism to protect the feelings of people who have never ever been married. This is so silly it defeats any effort at parody.

A June 2004 Wall Street Journal article by Jeffrey Zaslow (no, I don't know if he's available) began thus:

When Thomas Coleman visits legislators in Washington, D.C., to lobby for the rights of unmarried Americans, he isn't always taken seriously. People learn the name of his organization -- the American Association for Single People - ``and they immediately snicker,'' he says. ``They'll ask, `What's a dating service doing here in the Capitol?' ''

The article explains that the ``association ... also goes by Unmarried America to avoid the singles-club stigma....'' Everybody's a linguist these days.

AASP
American Association of Swine Practitioners. What a concept in emotional counseling!

Oh -- a veterinarians' group. And they gave up this cool name to become the AASV? Keep the faith, AABP!

AASP
ASCII Asynchronous Support Package.

AASROC
Asia-Africa Sub-Regional Organization Conference. A meeting of a couple of dozen states in July 2003. The meeting was opened by Indonesian president Megawati Soekarnoputri (see see this MW entry), who had proposed the meeting in 2002. The meeting generated a number of documents about intercontinental cooperation in a spirit of mutual respect and blah blah, but an even more substantive achievement was preparation for a meeting in 2005, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference (AAC). The earlier conference was presided over by President Sukarno, Megawati's father. The 1955 meeting, like the 2003 meeting, was held in the West Java capital of Bandung, but many things have changed in the intervening 48 years. For starters, the conference name has doubled in size. If it gets any longer it will be too unwieldy to be practical. They should consider splitting the conference into separate African and Asian meetings. (The national capital, Jakarta, is also in West Java, about 100 miles NW of Bandung.)

AASRP
American Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners. Could this mean... llamas!!?

Affiliated somehow with the AVMA.

What about sheep?

AASS
Asia Aero Supply Services.

AASSWB
American Association of State Social Work Boards. Now the ASWB.

AASV
American Association of Swine Veterinarians. Cf. AASP.

AAT
Acetic Acid Test. See VIA.

AAT
An American Translation, published in 1976. Why read a translation when you can read the original in Early Modern English?

AAT
Anglo-Australian Telescope. See AAO entry.

AAT
Animal-Assisted Therapy. The animal is not a leech. Cf. AAA.

AAT
Art and Architecture Thesaurus. An on-line service of the Getty Institute. A multi-level-hierarchical thesaurus with cross references and even a bit of useful information.

AAT
(UK) Association of Accounting Technicians.

AAT
Average Access Time.

AAT
Advanced (abbreviated A!) Authoring Tools.

AATA
The American Association of Teachers of Arabic. AATA ``aims to facilitate communication and cooperation [among] teachers of Arabic and to promote study, criticism, research and instruction in the field of Arabic language pedagogy, Arabic linguistics and Arabic literature.''

AATA
Ann Arbor (MI) Transit Agency. Buses.

AATA
Art & Archaeology Technical Abstracts. AATA, published on mutilated tree corpses from 1966 to 2000, is continued by AATA Online: Abstracts of International Conservation Literature.

AATC
Advanced Automatic Train Control.

AATCC
American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists.

AATF
American Association of Teachers of French. This glossary has occasionally useful entries for France and for the French langue.

AATG
American Association of Teachers of German. Serving teachers of German since 1926.

AATH
Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. It used to be called the American Association for Therapeutic Humor. I salute them for modifying the name without using a different punch line, I mean acronym.

Of course, the old claim goes that it takes twenty-five more muscles to frown than to smile, or something like that. So if it's strong face muscles you want, a real facial work-out, ill-humor is the face-healthy way to go. Grimace and snarl your way to strong, sexy lips!

Snopes has a page for this proverb, and includes a compilation of the putative respective numbers of muscles. Here are just the numbers (update of 2004.04.08):

muscle cnt.:     ratio
smile  frown
                   ________________
  17     41      2.4117647058823529
		   ________________
  17     43      2.5294117647058823
		   ______
  13     33      2.538461
		   ______
  13     50      3.846153
                   _
  15     65      4.3

   4     35      8.75

  10    100     10

  20    317     15.85

   4     64     16

   1     37     37

What we can see from this is that when both muscle counts are composite numbers, they almost always have a common factor.

AATI
American Association of Teachers of Italian.

AATJ
Alliance of Association of Teachers of Japanese. ``The Alliance offers training and professional development to Japanese language teachers in a variety of forms: by sponsoring workshops and summer institutes, by awarding individual small grants, and by sponsoring publications and materials.'' Apparently the AATJ is part of the ATJ.

AATN
Asociación Argentina de Tecnología Nuclear.

I can't seem to find a homepage for the organization (contact information on this page served by the Asociación Física Argentina, for AFA's nuclear and other divisions). I hope I can make it up to you with all necessary information. I'll just touch on the highlights. As they seem to me. The initially popular nationalist dictator Juán Perón was a great one for colorfully exaggerated turns of phrase. He famously boasted that Argentina would develop nuclear power and would sell it in 1 and 1.5-liter bottles (``en botellas de litro y litro y medio''). Mark this well: specificity adds bite. For other examples, also in the fiction genre, read Dickens. During the dictatorship, my father (Ing. Oscar Kriman) gave a public lecture on peaceful use of nuclear energy, as they used to say, and a government agent attended the lecture to make sure he said nothing that put Perón in a poor light.

People who know nothing of Argentine politics besides the Evita soundtrack wonder how anyone could fail to be charmed by a whore-turned-philanthropic-shakedown-artist and her fascist husband. It is hard to understand if you insist on remaining utterly ignorant, I guess. Oh wait: the prostitution charges, as well as any sense of historical reality, are denied on this worshipful webpage at the Eva Perón Foundation.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, well, Gabriel (another physicist of Argentine origin, like me) told me in 1980 that before the dirty war, Argentina had had more physicists per capita than any other country on earth. I haven't had a chance in the last quarter century to check that, but it seems credible. The dirty war began as the government of Isabelita Perón (J.D. Perón's second wife and vice president, then widow and president) was coming apart in the mid-1970's. The homepage of the AFA has a link to a list of 24 disappeared physicists, but many more left before they could be disappeared.

AATSEEL
American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.

AATSP
American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

AATT
Animal-Assisted-Therapy Team[s].

AAU
Amateur Athletic Union. You know, millions of unfortunate children across this great country are forced to focus on schoolwork during their school years -- educational stuff, books and pencils and all that. How is that ever going to improve their ability to flip a hamburger, eh? Each and every one of these children is missing the chance of a lifetime.

AAU
Association of African Universities. Association des Universités Africaines (l'AUA).

``The Association of African Universities is an international non-governmental organisation set up by the universities in Africa to promote cooperation among themselves and between them and the international Academic community. ...formed in November 1967 at a founding conference in Rabat, Morocco, attended by representatives of 34 universities who adopted the constitution of the Association. This followed earlier consultations among executive heads of African universities at a UNESCO conference on higher education in Africa in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1962 and at a conference of heads of African universities in 1963 in Khartoum, Sudan.''

Leave this site and read the Constitution and Bye Laws!

AAU
Association of American Universities. An association of sixty-one ``leading research universities'' in the US and Canada, as of April 2001.

``Founded in 1900 to advance the international standing of US universities... today focuses on issues that are important to research-intensive universities, such as funding for research, research policy issues, and graduate and undergraduate education.''

AAUG
Association of Arab-American University Graduates.

AAUP
Association of American University Presses. You can visit their Combined Online Catalog/Bookstore.

AAUP
American Association of University Professors.

AAUSC
American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators.

AAUW
American Association of University Women. Founded in 1881 to protect and promote the opportunity for women to attend university. Has recently taken up more hip causes. Holds its biennial national convention in June of odd-numbered years.

See more at the YWLS.

AAV
AdenoAssociated Virus[es].

AAV
Alternate Access Vendors.

AAV
Association of Avian Veterinarians.

AAVA
The American Academy of Veterinary Acupuncture. The only way I could have made this up myself is by playing Mad Libs.

AAVA
American Association of Veterinary Anatomists.

AAVC
American Association of Veterinary Clinicians. ``The mission of the American Association of Veterinary Clinicians is to enhance the quality of and be an advocate for veterinary clinical teaching, service, and research.'' Personally, I'm just gratified at their proficient construction of a tandem parallel structure, complete with different prepositions with a common object. They can put down my dog any day.

AAVE
African American Vernacular English. What used to be called BEV.

AAVI
American Association of Veterinary Immunologists.

AAVLD
American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians.

AAVMC
Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges.

AAVPT
American Academy of Veterinary Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

AAVS
American Anti-Vivisection Society.

AAVSB
American Association of Veterinary State Boards.

AAVSO
American Association of Variable Star Observers. The stars are variable, not necessarily the observers.

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A.A.V.V.
Auctores Varii. Latin: `Various authors.' Not the sort of abbreviation you'd be likely to encounter the singular form (A.V.) of. VV.AA. in Spanish.

AAW
Advertising Association of Winnipeg, Inc. Huh! And here I was thinking it was Winnipeg, Ont.

Hmmm. I seem to remember Winnipeg is a pretty big city. Why can't I find it on the map? There it is! What's it doing as the capital of Manitoba? This has been a very confusing day.

AAWR
American Association for Women Radiologists. Founded in 1981 ``to provide a forum for issues unique to women in radiology, radiation oncology and related professions; sponsor programs that promote opportunities for women; and facilitate networking among members and other professionals.'' Strangely, its official journal is the JWI, which has little to do with the stated purposes of the AAWR. I guess it's a marriage of convenience (this sort of thing is allowed in Massachusetts). The journal started publication in 1999, and the association between AAWR and JWI only dates back to 2003.

AAWV
American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians.

AAWW
The Asian American Writers' Workshop.

Until I hear different, I'm going to assume this is an Asian Workshop for people who write in the or an (which one isn't clear) American language.

AAZN
American Association for Zoological Nomenclature.

AAZV
American Association of Zoo Veterinarians.

AB
Just AB. Not an abbreviation or acronym or anything -- just A ... B. Pronounced ``Ay-Bee,'' but spelled more efficiently with only two letters. This is a personal name, distinct from, having no etymological relation to, and pronounced differently than, Ab.

The given name, or perhaps rather the taken name, of a buddy of mine in college. At birth he was given a couple of more conventional names, but he came to be called `AB,' much as `John Robert's come to be called `JR.' He had his name legally changed to `AB,' the beginning of no end of trouble. Every organization with its Procrustean form wanted to break his name apart and distribute the pieces to `First' and `M.I.' It was inevitable that he would become a philosopher.

His last name begins with C.

ab
ABdominal muscle. Usually plural -- abs. One of the first things you should do when you lose your mind and decide to become a black belt in Scrabble® is to memorize all the two-letter words. This one and its plural are in all three major Scrabble dictionaries.

AB
Able-Bodied (seaman).

ab-
ABsolute. An obsolete (absolete? obsolute?) prefix in old cgs unit systems. This goes back to a time when there were two kinds of standards that defined metric units -- ``absolute'' and ``international.'' Absolute units were defined according to a gold standard that was not very convenient (and which was kept in a single location -- Paris, I guess it must have been). The ``international'' value definitions corresponding to portable standards. In other words, absolute units were the fundamental definitions, or as fundamental as were in use at the time. International units were practical. The prefixes abs- and int- were applied to the unit names (as in ``abvolts'' and ``intvolts'') to indicate, if appropriate, which standards had been used.

There is another non-numerical prefix that was used with cgs units: stat-. This had to do with two parallel systems of electromagnetic units: the electrostatic cgs units and the electromagnetic cgs units. Interconversions among these systems are rather subtle, because they refer to units in systems with different underlying equations. (Distances, masses, and times are rather directly comparable, and their evaluation does not involve inference from an equation. Similarly acceleration, which has a natural definition not involving any proportionality constant. As soon as one gets into forces and charges, however, one has to use equations, and there are a number of different, equally ``natural'' ways to fit together the Maxwell's equations and the Lorentz force law. The cgs system allowed two different sets of equations, one convenient for electrostatics and one for magnetics, and avoided defining a unit of charge. The consequences persist to this day. The MKSA system, which extends the MKS system, is defined in terms of a single system of equations. Those equations are kind of clunky for theoretical work, but you can't have everything.)

AB
Adreßbuch. A German word.

A/B
AirBorne. There are many instances where this expansion can be ruled out on heuristic grounds.

AB, A.B.
Aktiebolag[et]. Swedish, `[the] stock company.' Cf. German equivalent AG.

AB
Postal abbreviation for the Canadian (.ca) province of Alberta. Capital: Edmonton.

AB
Amplified Bible. It's the good ol' Good Book, alright, but it's LOUDER.

Okay, here's another interpretation: it's a translation of the American Standard Version into English, with clarifying commentary. It contains so many hints that if you're not careful, you might be led into a tendentious reading. To avoid this danger, just look at the words without actually reading them. (That's what most people do.)

AB, A.B.
Arts Baccalaureate. Or the original Latin Artium Baccalaureus. Alternate name for BA.

AB
At Bat[s]. Baseball term. Originally called a ``hand.'' (See the striKe entry for related information.)

The slugging percentage is the average number of bases reached from home per AB. Excluded in the count are walks (base-on-balls or hit-by-pitch), sacrifices, and interference.

ABA
Acrylonitrile Butadiene Acrylate.

ABA
American Bankers Association.

ABA
American Bar Association. The professional society for American lawyers. Remember, if you can't say anything nice -- then at least don't say anything litigable.

ABA
American Basketball Association. Did a fast break. A challenge, from 1967 to 1976, to the NBA's near-monopoly on professional basketball entertainment in the US. In the end, the four strongest teams joined the NBA, the better players were hired into the NBA, and the rest of the ABA folded.

ABA
American Basketball Association. It's another challenge to the NBA, this one founded in 1999. It also uses a red, white, and blue ball, and it also has miserable ratings, if it has ratings at all. I suppose it might be a handy way to make a tax loss, so the one thing that might make the ABA a going proposition would be higher and more progressive marginal tax rates. One novelty I am aware of is that the new ABA has teams outside of English-speaking North America: Beijing, Tijuana, and Montreal. Okay, I've been in Montreal, and they speak English there too, but you have to say hello in French first or you'll be arrested.

ABA
American Booksellers Association. Excellent, informative site. Another good place to look for related information is Bookwire (TM), from Bowker Book Information Co.

Isaac Asimov wrote a mystery called Murder at the ABA. This ABA.

The ABA and AAP sponsor BookExpo America (BEA) in Chicago, Wednesday through Sunday following Memorial Day. It used to be called the American Booksellers Association Convention & Trade Exhibit.

ABA
American Bridge Association. Contract Bridge, you know? The card game, not the civil engineering project.

There's a separate organization called the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). In the bad old days, ABA was for blacks and ACBL was for whites. Both still exist as independent leagues.

ABA
Asociación de Bancos de Argentina. `Association of Banks of Argentina.' Since 1998; details at ADEBA. If this ABA and the preceding one got together, the next ABA might be the result.

ABA
Asociación del Bridge Argentino. `Association of Argentine Bridge.'

In case you're wondering -- and doubtless you are -- the standard noun-before-adjective order of Spanish would allow the name to be interpreted as `Argentine Association of Bridge.' However, gender agreement with asociación (feminine) would require the adjective to be argentina for this interpretation. So the name really implies that the bridge (card game) is Argentine rather than the association. It's a distinction without much difference, however. A construction like ``bridge argentino'' is understood as `bridge in Argentina' if there doesn't happen to be a particular Argentine game of bridge.

ABA
Association for Behavior Analysis.

ABAA
Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. A national association within the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers / La Ligue Internationale de la Librairie Ancienne (LILA/ILAB).

ABAAS
Anglo-British Academy of Advance Studies. For a fraction of a moment, you might be willing to suppose they mean British in the ``Brythonic'' sense common before the union of England and Wales with Scotland. Then you notice that they're not actually concerned with the Study of Advance. ``ABBAS is aware of the need for development & knowledge, as knowledge is power, and power is wealth.'' I'd like to see them develop this idea further, with conversion factors.

abacost
A bas le costume. Lemme see -- I guess that means `underwear'! Ooh, close: it means `down with the suit.' I like my translation better. The contraction was used in Zaire as the name for a faux-traditional dress of tunic and pants whose design was credited to the dictator Mobutu, and which was loosely inspired by the ``Mao [Zedong] suit.'' The tunic was designed to be worn with a foulard at the neck. The abacost was required business wear in Zaire, part of Mobutu's campaign for African ``authenticity'' (later simply called Mobutuism). More on that in the material we have on Mobutu Sese Seko's name.

In Woody Allen's 1971 movie ``Bananas,'' the new dictator of the banana republic decrees, as power almost visibly goes to his head, that underwear shall be changed frequently, and that in order to facilitate enforcement of the decree, underwear shall be worn on the outside. Mobutu's authenticity campaign began in 1971. If I track down the details, I may be able to say whether life imitated art or vice versa in this case. More on ``Bananas'' at the Abe entry below.

I guess that, just as the abacost was meant to be accessorized by a foulard, the Mao suit or Mao jacket was meant to be accessorized by a Mao cap. In 1980, my friend Fu was going home to Shanghai for some weeks and asked if there was anything I'd like him to bring back, so I asked for a Mao cap. I was already too late. On return he reported that they were already impossible to find in the city, though he figured they might still be available in the countryside.

Well, here it is August 2005, even Sendero Luminoso seems to have gone dark, yet there's still a place that's safe for Maoists. That's right: California. See the MIM entry.

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abacus
This is a serious glossary! How could we have an entry for abacost and not for abacus?

The mental image that most people have of an abacus is of the East Asian abacus: a rectangular frame that can be stood vertically, supporting two parallel ladders of horizontal bars with beads. (In Japanese: soroban; from Mandarin: suàn pán, meaning roughly `calculation board.') The traditional Western (or at least the ancient Greek and Roman) abacus was simply a small sandbox with pebbles. In Latin, a pebble, or small stone, is a calculus. Over time, the word took the sense of `means [or system] of computation,' or just calculation in general. In some cases, the calculation might be somewhat metaphorical -- e.g. ``moral calculus'' referring to the set of competing considerations, and the reasoning about them, used to make an ethical decision.

In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz first developed mathematical techniques based on infinitesimals. (They developed these independently and more or less simultaneously, and there was a bitter controversy over priority. As the contents of the Archimedes palimpsest originally discovered by Heiberg are teased out, we may see to what extent this contest is made moot.) Parts of the mathematical field that developed from that 17c. work came to be called the differential and the integral calculus. (Beyond the elementary calculations, it can become difficult to keep the two separate; e.g., integrating a nontrivial differential equation. Indeed, the fundamental theorem of calculus states essentially that the derivative of the indefinite integral of a function is the function itself, so the connection is quite fundamental.) Today the word calculus, not further modified, refers to elementary manipulations of differential and integral calculus. The word also continues to be used to help name some other mathematical subdisciplines, such as ``calculus of finite differences.''

On page 73 of the autobiography mentioned at the 86 entry, Stan Ulam relates a conversation he had with John von Neumann in 1936. Stan was disappointed with the isolationary specialization he found among mathematicians at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS).

Being a malicious young man, I told Johnny that this reminded me of the division of rackets among Chicago gangsters. The ``topology racket'' was probably worth five million dollars; the ``calculus of variations racket,'' another five. Johnny laughed and added, ``No! That is worth only one million.''

(BTW, that was a very sound correction, in relative terms, from a mathematician's perspective.)

In at least one case, the word calculus is used to give a name to a hodge-podge of tools and concepts: a fairly standard third-year college course for math majors is ``Advanced Calculus.'' This typically covers point-set topology on the real line, convergence of series, introduction to measure theory, etc. The graduate-level course that more or less covers a superset of this material is typically ``Analysis'' or ``Real Analysis'' (although the set of real numbers is really only one especially interesting special case). Analysis is another one of those words that could in principle mean so much that it might mean nothing at all if conventional usage were less parsimonious.

B. L. van der Waerden's obituary for Emmy Noether appeared in the German journal Mathematische Annalen [``Nachruf auf Emmy Noether,'' in vol. 111 (1935) pp. 469-476]. He mentions a number of awards that her work won, and a lot of them explicitly mentioned Arithmetik. In this context, of course, `arithmetic' referred to real-number (and general metric space) analysis.

Oh, bummer! I just realized that I have already written an entry for calculus! Well, follow the link -- there isn't too much overlap, and there's more on the abacus.

abandonware
Commercial software no longer sold, treated as free (but not freeware, q.v.). Term seems most prevalent in games programs.

ab asino lanam
Latin: `wool from an ass.' (That's a quadruped ass, not an arse.) Hen's teeth.

abatis
A barrier made of felled trees, according to the OSPD4. The sort of barrier common in the Scrabble forest. The plural form is formed with -es: abatises. The singular and plural are also spelled with double tee.

ABATS
Automated Bit Access Test System.

abattis
Abatis.

[column]

ABAW
Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. German, `Transactions of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.' Continues the journal SBAW, q.v. The philological study of classical antiquity is within the bailiwick of this Bavarian academy. So, as discussed at the Geisteswissenschaften entry, Wissenschaften means something like the French word sciences.

ABB
ASEA Brown Boveri.

[group picture of ABBA]

ABBA
The name of the group is the first initials of the band members: Agnetha Fältskog, Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad (listed here from oldest to youngest, FWIW; I think that's the order if there's an official one; there are, of course,
2 × 2 = 4
possible orders consistent with the group name; philologically speaking, I think it's suggestive that chronological ordering yields the name, which has an a priori probability of only 1/4 -- I mean, they might've been BABA). The first pair were married and the second pair had a relationship. Eventually, everyone split up reportedly amicably (in 1982) and continued solo or other-group careers. This unofficial page is as good a place to start as any. A French TV retrospective called ``Thank You ABBA'' led to a video, coreleased with CD box set.

In 1977, they released the album ``Knowing Me, Knowing You.'' The cover art featured the two couples in a somewhat symmetric order (B, A, A, B) and the group name written with an unprecedented degree of bilateral symmetry: the second letter B was printed backwards (i.e., facing left). ABBA was always very un-metallic and generally too sweet to be truly cool, so it's great to know that bands like NIN are derivative. Just call them ninnies.

ABBF
Asian BodyBuilding Federation.

ABBL
Association des Banques et Banquiers, Luxembourg. That might be its single official name, or its official name in French, or simply the name that appears first on its website. Alternate names given are ``The Luxembourg Bankers' Association'' and ``Luxemburger Bankenvereinigung.'' I've seen ABBL expanded in English-language reporting as the ``Association of Banks and Bankers of Luxembourg'' (almost the literal translation of the French name).

Like many Luxembourg websites, that of the ABBL is easiest to read if you are comfortable in at least a couple of languages. (English and French, in this case. To take another example, the Editpress Tageblatt Luxembourg, whose name is a slightly macaronic mix of at least English and German, has webpages in a mix of French and German. No translations are offered, of course. In a truly multilingual country, they're not needed.)

abbr., abbrev.
Abbreviations for abbreviation. Ooooh, spooky! Makes chills run up and down my spine, self-reference and all that.

abbreviated loans
We're not talking finance here. This is the entry for terms and words that undergo substantial abbreviation in the transition from one language (the ``source language'') to another language (the ``target language'' is the usual term, but I use ``destination language'' because it's obviously a superior term). In many cases, the abbreviation consists of dropping words from a compound noun or phrase in the original language. For now I'll just accumulate examples as I encounter or recall them. Maybe I'll draw some inferences later.

From English to various continental languages

parking lot > parking
smoking jacket > smoking

From English to Japanese

overhead projector > OP

ABC
ABaCavir. An NRTI used in the treatment of AIDS.

ABC
Absorbing Boundary Condition[s].

ABC
Academia Brasileira de Ciências. `Brazilian Academy of Sciences.' Founded May 3, 1916, in Rio de Janeiro, as Sociedade Brasileira de Sciencias. Name changed to current one in 1921. I guess they piggy-backed on the orthographic reform.

A-B-C
Accelerator, Brake, Clutch. The standard order of pedals, from right to left, in both LHD and RHD vehicles. If your motor vehicle doesn't have a clutch pedal, well whoop-dee-doo! Give your left-most foot a rest.

ABC
Activity-Based Costing. The evaluation of costs based on activities and procedures. Roll the dice.

In Portuguese, ABC is expanded `Custeio Baseado em Atividades.' Fascinating, isn't it? It's what makes the lives of glossarists the stuff of legend.

ABC
Always Buy Chesterfields. Apparently a once-persuasive and cogent advertising slogan for a brand of cigarettes with the longest name among popular brands.

Personally, I prefer Marlboros. Or is that Marlboroes? Marlboroughs? As it happens, I don't smoke, so this fact doesn't much affect any cigarette company's bottom line. You get a lot to like with a Marlboro. Like what?

You know, while we're on the subject: I feel that the cig companies are getting a bad rap on the ``societal costs of smoking'' thing. A bunch of state attorneys general have sued them to recover the state-funded portion of the greater medical expenses incurred by smokers, but this is only looking at one side of the ledger. Actuarial studies have repeatedly demonstrated that existing state cigarette taxes just about pay the total government costs caused by smoking. They don't cover the total increase in (government outlays for) medical treatment, but the difference is about made up by the decrease in social security benefits paid, since smokers don't live as long as nonsmokers. Obviously, the state attorneys general should be suing the federal government to adjust the funding formulas for social security.

I read that the cigarette companies introduced this argument once, but that it was rejected on some technicality. (You know, if you save someone's life it doesn't give you a right to kill them?) Still, why don't they publicize this totally exculpatory argument? It would improve their public image, sure. (I guess they settled the suit, but when the US Congress refused to sign off on their part of the bargain, it left a lot of things unresolved. As of July 2000, I don't know the status anymore.)

ABC
American Bird Conservancy. In 1997, ABC launched a propaganda campaign called ``Cat Indoors!'' As you can imagine, the goal of this campaign is to create an unnatural predator-free environment for birds, so that marginally viable birds compete with healthy ones for limited food supplies, and bird populations are kept in check only by the ravages of slow-acting starvation and disease. It is cruel not only to wild birds but to all the animals raised in confined and degrading conditions for eventual slaughter and milling into canned cat food.

Of course, the bird conservancy helpfully points out, ``Keeping Cats Indoors Isn't Just For The Birds'' (it's the title of a free brochure). They say that ``[s]cientists [scientists!] estimate that free-roaming cats kill hundreds of millions of birds, small mammals, reptiles and amphibians each year.'' To think of all those cute furry rats whose diseased, bird-egg-eating lives are brought to a premature end.

ABC
American-Born Chinese. Ethnic Chinese born in the US. Not exactly the complement of FOB. Cf. ABCD.

ABC
American Bowling Congress. The world's largest sports organization and the official rule-making body of tenpin bowling. Perhaps you'd care to peruse some extensive bowling pages. (Sponsor must worship eyestrain. No longer does that multiple-title-tags garbage that takes so long to load, but now the server-push graphics are about as irritating as the much-hated <BLINK> tag.)

ABC
American Broadcasting Company does television and radio. They are a Mickey Mouse company (Back in the 1980's, people joked that ABC stood for ``Aaron's Broadcasting Company.'' The late Aaron Spelling was an executive producer, with creators Esther and Richard Shapiro, and some others, of Dynasty (1981-1989). That probably understates Spelling's importance, but I have a family connection to the Shapiros, so that's the way it's going to stay. We have an alternate Spelling entry anyway.)

In ``Brilliant Mistake,'' Elvis Costello sings

She said that she was working for the ABC News,
It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use.
but lately (1998-9) he's been writing lyrics for Burt Bacharach music. This is probably good news for the person or persons who enjoy the music of both. Hmm. Enough to fill a concert hall, apparently. One fan who left a paw print at amazon.com likes Elvis Costello's ``cleaver intellegint lyrics.''

More on ``Brilliant Mistake'' lyrics at the Cu entry, of course. Complete lyrics of the song here.

ABC
Argentina, Brasil, Chile. That's Spanish for (just guessing here) probably Argentina, Brazil, Chile. ``ABC'' was too hard to remember, so now Mercosur is used.

ABC
Associação Blumenauense pró-Ciclovias. `Blumenau Association for Bike Paths.' Blumenau is a city in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina.

The initialism ABC is also used in Brazil in reference to the manufacture of automobiles and possibly other stuff, but I can't seem to track it down. You're eager to know why I care. I care because someday I aspire to write a complete entry about the Brazilian politician called Lula, and Lula got his nickname (and his start in politics, as a labor activist) when he was a worker in the ABC industry.

ABC
Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Built by John Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry at Iowa State in 1939. A linear algebra solver. (Twenty-nine simultaneous equations, I think it was.) It operated in the basement of the Physics Building at ISU until 1942. Just for yucks, Cf. ABC.

ABC
Audit Bureau of Circulations. Sort of like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, but they put on their flak jackets and load their twelve-gauges if you're late returning your library books (vide CIRC desk). Maybe not. Do you feel lucky, punk?

You do? Okay, then, I guess the ABC is a national organization that keeps track of (``audits'') periodical distribution (``circulation'') rates, and maybe TV and other media, so advertisers can figure out how much they owe the media that carry their ads. It's a different national organization in different countries. (You can sort out the grammatical number agreement yourself; I need to get to sleep.) They're getting into the web advertising business, too.

It seems clever (or cleaver?) to them to offer an alternate expansion...
Authoritative.
Believable.
Credible.
Not to me.

See the international organization that masterminds the conspiracy of all the putatively independent national organizations: IFABC.

ABC
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Channel 2. Known as ``Auntie'' (as is the BBC).

ABC
Automatic Binary Computer, completed in 1953. (Not to be confused with the famous ABC of a decade and a half earlier.) According to the Giant Computers file, this computer contained 1,200 tubes, 500 crystals, and 50 relays, and occupied 250 square feet.

ABC
An elementary programming language originally intended as a replacement for BASIC.

See full details of ABC and its implementations, with example programs, in The ABC Programmer's Handbook by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens and Steven Pemberton, (Prentice-Hall ISBN, 0-13-000027-2).
Also, ``An Alternative Simple Language and Environment for PCs,'' Steven Pemberton, IEEE Software, 4, Nº 1, pp. 56-64 (January 1987).

A major web resource for this language appears to be this one, maintained by Steven Pemberton.

ABC uses nesting by indentation and mixes terse shellish features with loquacious baby-programmer talk.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes source code for two elementary ABC programs -- and after all, how often do I get to write ``elementary ABC''? Neumann identifies Amos, BASIC, Euphoria, Profan, and REXX as similar languages.

ABC
The first three letters of the Latin and English alphabets. Because the alphabet is such an elementary piece of knowledge, ``ABC'' is often used to represent something elementary or basic or initial.

The first three letters of the Greek alphabet are alpha, beta, and gamma (α, β, γ). If you rotate a capital γ (Γ), tipping it 45 degrees on its back, you can see the resemblance: the C is a rounded version of a wedge open to one side. The Romans borrowed the Etruscan alphabet, which the Etruscans borrowed from the Greeks living in southern Italy (hence from a ``Western Greek'' alphabet).

At each adoption, there was usually adaptation, and there were also evolutionary changes and reforms within the histories of individual languages. Rotation and other deformations of the letter glyphs were among the evolutionary changes. Another kind of evolutionary change was forced by phonetic changes in the language. In Latin, the sound represented by the third letter of the alphabet was originally some kind of ``hard-gee'' sound, but became devoiced into a hard cee (a k sound, though this too evolved further). A letter for the hard-gee sound was still needed, because the sound was retained in many words, but was no longer unambigously represented by the third letter. This led to a reform.

The Western Greek alphabets, and the Etruscan, had epsilon, digamma, and zeta as the next three letters. The epsilon essentially became our E, the digamma our F, and the zeta our Z. (The digamma is less known today because it was discarded from the Attic Greek alphabet which became dominant in regions where Greek ultimately continued to be written.) The reform consisted of discarding the Z, which was not needed in Latin at the time, and replacing it with a slightly modified form of C that is G. The Z was eventually added back on at the end of the alphabet when the Romans needed it for the many words that were being borrowed from Greek.

Everyone knows about the Alpher Bethe Gamow paper, which has its own Wikipedia entry. Basically, Ralph Alpher was working towards his Ph.D. under George Gamow at Cornell, and had written a paper on nucleosynthesis. The author line would have read R.A. Alpher and G. Gamow, but ``[i]t seemed unfair to the Greek alphabet to have the article signed by Alpher and Gamow only, and so the name of [his colleague] Dr. Hans A. Bethe (in absentia) was inserted in preparing the manuscript for print. Dr. Bethe, who received a copy of the manuscript, did not object, and, as a matter of fact, was quite helpful in subsequent discussions. There was, however, a rumor that later, when the alpha, beta, gamma theory went temporarily on the rocks, Dr. Bethe seriously considered changing his name to Zacharias.''

Gamow, who wrote the quoted text in his 1952 book, The Creation of the Universe, was of course well aware that the last letter of the Greek alphabet is omega. He was just making another pun, and some leeway is allowed. ``Bethe,'' however, requires very little. The name is pronounced as in German, so the th has a tee sound, and the final e has something of a shwa sound, so overall it sounds like the English pronunciation of ``beta.'' The only surprising thing is that -eta in Greek letter names is pronounced with a long a for the stressed vowel in North American English (just as in German). In Britain, the standard dialects make it a long e, as in Velveeta. (In the nonstandard dialects, I suppose the names of Greek letters may not occur very frequently, except perhaps in ``Catherine Zeta-Jones.'') In compensation, the standard dialects in Britain are nonrhotic, so Alpher sounds more similar to alpha.

The wordplay in the author line goes beyond the coincidence of echoing the beginning of the Greek alphabet. The main types of radiation associated with nuclear decay are alpha, beta, and gamma rays. Also, the hypothesis of the paper was that nuclei are generated in a step-by-step sequence loosely resembling progress through the alphabet. (The individual step in the process was the capture of a neutron in increase the atomic mass number. Different nuclei along these isobars could then be generated by electron or positron emission, or by electron capture.) Retrospectively, we know that Alpher's theory (the one in the alpha beta gamma paper) was superseded by Bethe's theory (he became interested in the topic and correctly hypothesized that nucleosynthesis of elements beyond helium took place in stars).

Less well-known is another close association between Gamow and the Greek alphabet, which I quote here from the recollections of É.L. Andronikashvili of the early 1930's, when he was a physics student in Saint Petersburg (then called Leningrad). (These appear in, and apparently were written for, Khalatnikov's book on Landau, pp. 60-62.) He and his brother used to attend parties at the house of, and organized by, the stepdaughters of the translator Isai Benediktovich Mandel'shtamm, a translator. There he first met Lev Davidovich Landau, called ``Dau,'' newly returned from three years abroad to teach at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute. (The older stepdaughter, Genia Kannegiser, was a mathematical physicist.)

  Dau was accompanied by his associates, also physicists: Bronstein (nicknamed `the Abbot'), Gamow (`Johnny'), and Ivanenko (`Dimus'), who was later excommunicated' -- that is, denied the friendship of Landau and even the right to be acquainted with him.
...   Gamow's wife was also present, a Moscow University student whom he had brought over from there. She too had a nickname, `Rho,' after the Greek letter ρ. Later, she became `Rho-zero' (ρ0). All this seemed quite pretentious.

Nowadays in physics, the letter rho most frequently represents resistivity or density. It doesn't seem especially flattering. Maybe she was a redhead.

ABCA
America, Britain, Canada and Australia. This has appeared in HSE documents, and if we keep quiet about it the Kiwis won't find out and be upset. I haven't seen ``ABCAN'' used anywhere.

ABCA
American Baseball Coaches Association.

ABCA
Antwerp British Community Association. It ``was exclusively British when founded in 1920 but is no longer so. Our strong and growing Anglophone association now exists to promote English language and cultural contact between all nationalities. It provides an opportunity for social contact which people, living mainly in the Greater Antwerp area, might want or need.'' The ABCA Clubhouse is located at Paardenmarkt 111, 2000 Antwerpen, which turns out to house the Belfry of BATS as well. Cf. BBCA.

ABCBP
American Board of Cognitive and Behavioral Psychology. One of various boards run by the ABPP.

ABCCS
AirBorne Communications, Command, and Control System. Specially equipped version of the C-130 military transport, coordinates air and ground forces.

ABCD
Agency, Board, Commission, or {Department|Division}. Government jargon used since at least about 2002 in Toronto, and possibly nowhere else.

ABCD
American-Born Confused Desi. A Desi (``day-SHE,'' a subcontinent Indian) born in the US and (possibly only perceived as being) torn between traditional Indian culture and US culture. Also the title of a 1999 film about two ABCD's. Cf. HINA and NRI, and ethnically further afield, the probable model for the ABCD initialism: ABC.

A highly successful book I have seen billed as ``first-ever South Asian American coming-of-age story'' is Born Confused (2002) by Tanuja Desai Hidier. It was one of the books plagiarized by Kaavya Viswanathan for her cut-and-paste achievement How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life.

ABCD
Asymmetry, Border, Color, Diameter. Four basic warning signs of melanoma:
  1. -- Asymmetry. Skin discoloration in a shape that does not have a well-defined center. (Or, as nonmathematical physicians express it: ``if a line is drawn through the middle, the sides don't match.'' What ``middle''?)
  2. -- Border. Irregular shape. Not just asymmetric but with scalloped or notched edge.
  3. -- Color. Typically brown or black, and sometimes with mixes of red, white, and blue. How patriotic!
  4. -- Diameter. Larger than a quarter inch.

ABCD data switch
Four-way switchbox: data in or out from one side can be switched to data out or in, respectively, of one of four other devices. Common way for multiple machines to share a printer, or one machine with one serial or parallel port available to be connected to multiple peripherals. Not a device to challenge the mind, and not expensive, but handy.

abcissa
This entry is here because I can never remember how to spell abscissa.

ABCL
American Birth Control League. Founded in 1920 by Margaret Sanger. Name changed in 1930 to Planned Parenthood.

ABCMOS
Advanced Bipolar and CMOS (process technology). ``Advanced Bipolar'' means bipolar made using technology developed for CMOS.

ABC Museum
Alyce Bartholomew Children's Museum: For ages 6-12; 2921 Franklin St., Michigan City, IN; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturdays and by appointment Mondays through Fridays; (219) 874-8222; $2.50-$3.50.

All information subject to change without my noticing. This is a pretty remote corner of the glossary, I may not be back for a while.

ABC-P, ABCP
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay. Some old trade agreement. See Mercosur.

ABCS
Antimonide-Based Compound Semiconductor. Refers in practice to heterostructures made from the InAs/AlSb/GaSb system, as well as the binary, tertiary, and quaternary alloys. Here's a webpage that's highly authoritative because it's from an authority that spends mony to buy research on ABCS technology.

ABCS
Army Battle Command System.

ABCT
Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. New initialism of the old AABT (they dropped ``Advancement'' from the title). Another old B organization that has added a C to its name is AABP (now AACBP).

ABCTE
American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence. The awkward, ill-thought-out English on their website suggests that they may be trusted to maintain the same standards currently prevailing in the ``profession.''

abd
ABDom{ en | inal }. Medical terminology. (At least, I don't think butchers use this abbreviation in their patient work-ups.)

ABD
All-But-Dissertation. Facetiously: the degree before Ph.D. In the final stage, this may also be expanded ``All But Done.'' Of course, the final stage is longer than all the rest combined, and possibly terminal.

There appears to be a support group for these people; I've seen their signs by the clinic:

``Students for Life.''

The TTBOMKAB entry mentions in passing a young woman who, in 1969, has been renting a cabin in upstate New York for ``several years,'' writing her dissertation. The story (nonfiction) is told by Philip Roth, who seems to imply that she was working on it for the four years they lived together starting in 1969. Call me impatient, but I think of this as not getting on with your life. What people with an ABD degree usually do is feel guilty and drive a cab or something.

Perhaps the most famous instance of an ABD that eventually led to a Ph.D. was the case of Frank Bourgin. In 1945, he received a letter stating the ``unanimous opinion'' of his Ph.D. committee that his 617-page manuscript needed the kind of work that could only be done if he quit his job and came back to the University of Chicago to finish it. With a family to support, he could not do this. Crushed and bitter, he put it away for over forty years, only looking at the box that held it on the eight occasions when he moved. Finally he looked at it again after he retired. The dissertation became The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic (1989) (xxiv+246 pp.). This was not an ordinary ABD situation. Four decades later, it was hard to reconstruct what had happened, but it seems that Prof. Leonard D. White, member of the Ph.D. committee and chair of the department, had -- not to put too fine a point on it -- lied. White apparently reported the ``unanimous opinion'' of Bourgin's committee without in fact consulting the rest of the committee. The surviving member claims he never saw the dissertation. Bourgin's advisor was busy with wartime work in Washington, DC, and retired afterwards. He had proposed Bourgin's topic but gave him less help or supervision than was normal. The full story of how Bourgin was eventually awarded his Ph.D. in Pol. Sci. on June 10, 1988, is told in the preface and in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s foreword to that book (read the latter first, to avoid confusion).

ABDA
American-British-Dutch-Australian. Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands (and Belgium, Luxembourg, and France) beginning on May 10, 1940. The Netherlands received an ultimatum -- to surrender or have its cities destroyed. On May 14, Rotterdam was bombed, leaving 814 dead and 78,000 homeless; the Netherlands surrendered on May 15. Queen Wilhelmina and leading members of her government escaped to London, where a government-in-exile was established. Most of the Dutch Navy also escaped.

The Dutch fleet saw action in the Java Sea in late February 1942, where a combined ABDA fleet battled a Japanese fleet covering an invasion force approaching Java (part of the Dutch East Indies). The Allied fleet consisted of a cruiser from each country and some destroyers, and had no air support. The Allies were routed. Of the entire Allied fleet then operating in the Dutch East Indies, only four American destroyers made it back to Australia.

aBDC, ABDC, abdc
After Bottom Dead Center. See BDC.

Abe
Abraham. Abraham Lincoln preferred to be called Abraham rather than Abe, but even when he was president he often didn't have a choice.

Abraham was considered to have an unattractive face. During the famous debates with Douglas, when Douglas accused him of being two-faced, he replied by asking rhetorically, whether if he had another face, he'd be wearing the one he had on. While he was president a young girl wrote him a letter suggesting that he'd look better with a beard. He took the advice. Why didn't Mary Todd think of that?

Abe also had a lazy eye. Daguerrotypes or early photographs from the time of his presidency were generally ``corrected.''

Press pictures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt never showed his wheelchair or crutches. Television didn't either. (He attended a world's fair where an experimental TV system was being demonstrated, and became the first US president to appear on television.)

I decided to grow a beard a couple of years ago. It looked good when it was starting, but I'd have to trim it to Yassir Arafat length to keep it looking good. The main issue, however, is kissing. In Latin America, the saying is Un beso sin bigote es como un huevo sin sal. [`A kiss without a mustache is like an egg without salt.'] To judge by my experience here in the US, however, American women prefer their eggs without salt. I mean, it can't be me.

The title of Woody Allen's Bananas refers to a Central American banana republic that is the scene of much of the action. Back in Nueva York, the Woody Allen character's love interest Nancy is played by Louise Lasser (Woody Allen's love interest at the time). She leaves him because some indefinable ``something is missing,'' she doesn't know what. Some improbable accidents later, he returns to fund-raise in New York, a leftist guerilla leader in big-beard-and-mustache disguise. Nancy is attracted. In bed she screams ``That's what was missing!'' Still, as I noted (read the previous paragraph if you already forgot) this is the exception rather than the rule among the Anglos.

I suppose that the saying has added significance in Spanish, owing to the fact that huevo (`egg') is slang for testicle. In fact, a form of apparent hermaphroditism that arose from a spontaneous mutation a couple of generations back in the Dominican Republic (.do) was locally known as huevos a doce (`eggs at twelve'). We ain't talkin' midnight breakfast at Denny's here, capisce? Fetal androgen deficiency leads to male babies with apparently female external genital organs; testosterone surge at puberty produces male appearance and reproductive function (pretty much).

Consider the merkin.

I've often wondered if Sp. bigote is etymologically related to Eng. bigot, but I've never bothered to check. Okay, I just checked. Etymology uncertain.

Bananas -- now why would a sex-obsessed comedian and occasional ironist name a movie after a fruit? Is there a deeper reason? What kind of bananas? Give me 400 words; the exam ends promptly at 4:30. (This issue isn't addressed at the electrical banana entry, though Woody Allen is mentioned there.) Woody -- how did he end up with that name? His given name isn't Woodrow.

ABE
Acceptor-Bound Exciton.

ABE
Advanced Book Exchange. ``[T]he INTERNET's most popular service for buying and selling out-of-print, used, rare and antiquarian books.'' See also a select listing here.

Precise relationship to ABAA unclear, but in any case, while I'm having trouble reaching its server, the list of ABAA members on ABE is up.

ABE
Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering.

ABE
IATA code for Lehigh Valley International Airport (abbreviated LVI in road signs, located closest to Allentown, PA, USA, but the letters ABE reflect its traditional name, Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton Airport, for the three largest cities it serves. Here's its status in real time from the ATCSCC.

ABEF
Agri-Business Educational Foundation. The executive vice president of NAMA also serves as the president of the ABEF.

abele
A Eurasian tree, according to the OSPD4. It can be found scattered throughout the Scrabble forest. Plural form abeles.

ABELL
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Apparently now integrated into Literature Online (LION).

ABEND
ABnormal END. ``End'' in the sense of program run termination. I mean, it doesn't mean flat butt or anything.

Abend
German, `evening.' Normal end of day.

To be fair, I should note that the end of the day for dating purposes has varied historically, and only recently become settled, for most civil purposes, as midnight.

Jewish religious dates are reckoned to begin at sundown. Thus for example, a Jewish holiday that in a particular Gregorian year falls on what is nominally September 1 is celebrated or observed beginning at sundown on August 31. The talmudic reasoning for this is based on the wording of the Genesis creation story, which includes a repeated formula translated ``and there was night, and day -- the first day.'' This is taken to imply that the day begins with nightfall.

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a lot of different places were considered as possibilities for a Jewish national homeland. The Soviets even allocated a place in the middle of southeastern nowhere and deported some Jewish volunteer settlers there. Other places seriously considered were in Africa, in Grand Island, New York, and, oh yeah, the bloody Middle East. Grand Island is very close to Canada. Parts of Canada are north of the Arctic circle. If a place inside the Arctic circle had been selected, then for some of the year there would be no sunset, wreaking havoc with Jewish holiday reckoning. I don't claim that this observation is original with me, and neither did Mordecai Richler. In his Solomon Gursky Was Here, he recalled the old proof that neither Judaism nor Islam could be universal religions: fasting for an entire day would kill the Arctic/Antarctic dweller. He had some fun with the implications of this for the Inuit.

Also, matzah trees probably don't bloom that far north. Traditionally, however, there's another explanation of how the Jewish homeland came to be where it is. After the Lord of the Universe brought His people out of Egypt (Mitzraim), He asked Moses (Moshe) where he would like to have the Jewish national homeland. You'll recall that Moses was a stutterer. This is probably the real reason why they wandered around in the desert for forty years. Moses wanted a land flowing with milk and honey and all, and he answered the Lord ``Ca... Ca-a... Cana... Cana-a...'' and the omniscient Lord of all creation said ``Oh, Canaan. No problem. So be it.'' Actually, what Moses was trying to say was Canada.

Incidentally, a better transliteration for Canaan would be Cana'an. See the aa entry for more on that. And also, the Thirty-Second Medieval Workshop was hosted by the U of BC in Vancouver (24-26 October 2002). The theme was ``Promised Lands: The Bible, Christian Missions, and Colonial Histories in Latin Christendom, 400-1700 AD.'' Now back to the subject of the entry -- Abend...

Observational astronomers spend the night hours awake and would prefer to have all the records of a particular night correspond to a single ``day.'' For this reason, Scaliger's useful Julian day scheme was eventually extended by astronomers so that Julian days begin at noon (at the Greenwich meridian). Of course, this isn't very useful if you're observing in Hawaii, or even at the AAO. For more on Julian days, see JD entry.

This page shows where on earth you can get some shut-eye.

Abendländer, Abendlaender
German, literally `evening lands,' literarily `the Occident.' Like, you know, `the West.' Like Morgenlaender, the singular form is used only in the genitive.

aberemurder
Defined forthrightly in the always useful Pantologia (London, 1813) as
plain or downright murder; as distinguished from the less heinous crimes of manslaughter, and chance-medley. It is derived from Saxon æbere, apparent, notorious, and morth, murder; and was declared a capital offence without fine or commutation, by the laws of Canute, and of Henry I.

If you had the word murder already on the board, and five more common tiles on your rack... but no, the word does not occur in any of the three major Scrabble dictionaries. That just kills me.

ABET
Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. Gives accreditation to university programs in these disciplines. Arguably the single most destructive influence on Engineering education in the US, although the NSF is horning in on the action with seed money for fashionable foolishness.

Abf.
Abfahrt. German for `departure.' That a German word beginning with ab- should have as its English translation a Romance word beginning in de- is often no accident; cf. Abg.

ABF
Australian Bridge Federation. The largest of the four NBO's comprising the South Pacific Bridge Federation (SPBF -- Zone 7 of the WBF). In 2006, the ABF had 32,501 members. Interestingly, the NBO of New Zealand (NZCBA) had nearly half as many (15,050). Some further numbers to illumine this: the populations of Australia and New Zealand are about 21 million and 4.2 million, respectively. Whipping out my satisfyingly rigid slip stick (because it requires fewer keystrokes to bring up than the calculator app), I estimate that this yields an interest level of 4.387012.

AbFab
ABsolutely FABulous. A British TV series, 1992-1996.

ABFFE
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. See also FEN.

ABFP
American Board of Family Practice.

ABFP
American Board of Forensic Psychology.

Abg.
Abgeordnete[r]. German: `[elected or appointed] representative.' A noun declined as an adjective. The form with final r is male. (For a slight discussion of this sort of noun, see Vors.) Abgeordneter also functions as a title, Herr Abgeordneter Litfaß and Frau Abgeordnete Litfaß serving for `Representative Litfass.'

Etymologically, Abgeordnete corresponds approximately to the English noun delegate, with ab- and de- both having a sense like `off, away,' so the person is one `sent away' (in Romance) or `ordered off' (in German). For a parallel instance, see Abf. [I should make clear that ordnen, of which geordnet is the past participle, is normally used in the sense of `organize, arrange.' It is cognate with English verb order, of course, which can be synonymous with command, but `command' is not a common sense of the German verb.]

ABG
Arterial Blood Gas.

Abh.
Abhandlung[en]. German, `paper[s], treatise[s].'

ABHAI
Association of BHaratanatyam Artistes of India.

AbhBerl
Abhandlungen der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. `Papers of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin.'

abhesive
Gesundheit! Oh, sorry, I thought I heard a sneeze.

An abhesive is a material that resists adhesion. This is the noun use of an adjective, of course, but you can figure out the meaning of the adjective from the meaning of the noun. I resist defining adjectives. Oh, okay: ``that resists adhesion.'' Happy now? ``Like teflon.''

AbhGött, AbhGoett
Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. `Papers of the Academy of Sciences at Goettingen.'

AbhHeid
Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. `Papers of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.'

AbhKM
Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes. `Papers for Announcements about the Orient.'

The word Morgenlande is an archaism. At the time this word was used in ordinary speech, it meant what the English term the Orient meant: the exotic regions to the east of Europe, with a strong connotation of backwardness. That Orient included the Middle East (Near East) and the Far East.

Except in the genitive case, only the plural form of the German term was used. Landes is the genitive singular of Land. The form Lande which I used above is an archaic nominative plural; if the term were coined today the nom. pl. would have to be Morgenländer. You know, that ILL request is gonna take a while, so you've got some time. Why not amble over to the Morgenlande entry and read some more about this fascinating word? Oh wait, wait: you get to choose. I just thought of another German word with an interesting semantic history.

[column]

AbhLeip
Abhandlungen des Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. `Papers of the Saxon [as in Saxony] Academy of Sciences at Leipzig.'

For classicists, it would be short for Abhandlungen des Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse. (After the comma: `Philological-Historical section.')

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AbhMainz
Abhandlungen der [Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse,] Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. `Papers of the [Humanities and Social Sciences Section,] Academy of Sciences and Literature at Mainz.' [The section indicated in square brackets is of interest to classicists.]

AbhMünch, AbhMuench
Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, München, Philosophisch-historische Klasse. Abhandlungen. `Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich, Philosophical-Historical Section. Papers.'

ABI, A.B.I.
Acquired Brain Injury. Variably defined, but generally excludes prenatal injury, genetic defect, degenerative neurological disease, and disability stemming from mental illness. It probably includes acute alcohol poisoning. Since adjusting the definition of this general term does not materially advance or retard the ability to treat any brain injury, it can mean whatever you please.

ABI
Advanced (abbreviated A!) Bus Interface.

ABI
Alcohol[ic] Beverage Industry. Cf. this other ABI.

ABI
Application Binary Interface. Software emulation of a distinct operating environment, allowing binaries of an application for certain operating systems on certain platforms to run under a different OS on a different platform (like MS-DOS programs on Mac).

ABI
Association of British Insurers. The trade association for the UK's insurance industry, representing about 400 companies and about 95% of the industry's business as of 2005.

ABI
Automated Broker Interface.

ABIAF
Association of British Independent Accounting Firms. The word order is odd -- one might expect independent to modify British accounting firms. The order might be due to what seems to have been an earlier name of the organization: ``Association of British Independent Chartered Accountants.'' In a chemical analogy, we might say that independent ``binds more tightly'' to chartered accountant. The reason is that chartered accountant alone describes an individual with a certain level of professional education or certification (like professional engineer or licensed practical nurse). The term independent chartered accountant, on the other hand, is a bit like the term independent scholar among academics: it communicates how the person does business. That makes independent chartered accountants an easily recognizable term that can be reasonably modified by a nationality, while independent British chartered accountants might not be so immediately parseable. Still, one wishes they'd gone with ``British Association of....''

ABIOS
Advanced BIOS.

Abk.
Abkurzung. German for `abbreviation [of a word or phrase], shortening [of a meeting, for example], short cut.' The abbreviation Abk., as opposed to the word, occurs primarily in dictionaries, with the first sense given.

ABKA
American Boarding Kennel Association. Former name of the Pet Care Services Association (PCSA).

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abl.
ABLative. One of the cases into which nouns may be declined in an inflected language. The Latin ablative case subsumes instrumental and locative cases, although there are a few rare words with distinct instrumental or locative form. (That is, it is inferred from other Indo-European languages, and from scraps of evidence within Latin itself, that Latin once had a more robust case system with separate instrumental and locative forms.)

Most prepositions in Latin take objects in the accusative or ablative case. [In the same way, pronouns that are the objects of prepositions in English are in the objective case. Thus ``you and I, or we'' give a gift, but a gift is given ``to you and me, or us.'' Obviously, English has a rather fragmentary case system, in which the subject and object forms of nouns and of the personal pronouns you and it are not distinguished.]

Noun phrases occur in various functions in a sentence, and not just as the objects of prepositions. The various cases in Latin are used to indicate these functions. For some cases, the function is quite straightforward. The vocative is used to address the named person. (Hence Shakespeare's Caesar calls out, ``Et tu, Brute.'' Brute here is the vocative form of Brutus.) There are vocative forms for nouns that you wouldn't normally address directly; Winston S. Churchill found this situation scandalous, but then he was always one to see the moral dimension in things. Similarly, the nominative indicates the subject of a sentence (this is typically the same as the agent), the accusative marks the direct object, etc. The uses of the ablative case are not so straightforward, and resist being summarized. Thus, Latinists like to (or in any case do) define various categories of ablative corresponding to various instances in which a noun phrase ought to be declined in the ablative case. These can get amusing. Okay, usually just mildly amusing. Come on, grin a little bit. We don't have a very extensive list yet. You can watch as it is built.

Or else you can go and watch paint dry. It's up to you.

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ablative of association
The ablative case when used for the noun or noun phrase that in English would typically be the object of the preposition with, when the action described by the verb involves some kind of spatial or metaphorical closeness. (These uses are conceived as deriving from the Indo-European instrumental case, which is merged with the IE ablative and locative cases in the case that is simply called the ablative in Latin.)

Charles E. Bennett's article, ``The Ablative of Association,'' on pp. 64-81 of the 1905 issue of TAPA, has the following initial footnote: ``This investigation has had regard to the [Latin] literature down to the time of Apuleius. While the lists of examples are quite full, it is not claimed that they are absolutely complete for all authors.'' Bennett agreed with those Indo-Europeanists who regarded the IE instrumental ``as having primarily a sociative force'' and sought to ``show that the range and frequency of the instrumental are much more extensive in Latin than is at present recognized. According to my observations it appears with verbs of joining, entangling, mixing, sharing, being attended, keeping company with, being accustomed, wedding, mating, piling, playing, changing and interchanging, agreeing, wrestling; also with adjectives of equality.'' I dunno -- it looks like he might have overplayed his hand.

To be in greater sympathy with this view, one may observe that the German preposition mit serves more of an instrumental function than the corresponding English preposition with. (They are almost certainly not cognates, but each overlaps more closely in meaning with the other than either does with any other preposition in the other language.) Specifically, I have in mind constructs like ``mit Bus,'' meaning `by bus.'

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ablecti
Latin: a select body of ancient Roman soldiers (back when they weren't ancient) chosen from among those called extraordinarii. [Acc. to Pantologia (London, 1813)]. Wow! It kind of reminds me of Dilia's reaction when we went to see the movie Superman.

Hmmm. It just occurred to me that in Europe (in Germany and Italy, anyway), ordinarius professors are regular faculty, and extraordinarius professors are just adjuncts (like ``extras'' in a show). So maybe the ablecti weren't the best of the best, but at best only the best of the rest. I'll have to check back.

These confusions seem to happen a lot. A medieval epithet expressing great respect, and bestowed on very few, was stupor mundi. This means `wonder of the world,' but that's not exactly what it sounds like to the average English-speaker (you have to think ``stupefier, stunner' for stupor).

[dive flag]

ABLJ
Adjustable Buoyancy Life-Jacket. Early name for early versions of what have now been refined into neutral-buoyancy devices called BC's or BCD's. In Britain, apparently, the term is still used for horsecollar-style snorkel vests.

The horsecollar-style emergency life-jackets used to be called by a more evocative name. If I were singing ``Hey Nineteen,'' at this point I would insert a lyric about Mae West.

ablude
An English verb (from Latin abludo) meaning be unlike [acc. to Pantologia (London, 1813)].

abluent
An English adjective (from Latin abluens) meaning that has the power of cleaning [acc. to Pantologia (London, 1813)]. Cognate with ablution, a word so commonly used that I've even read it somewhere other than a dictionary.

ABM
Activity-Based Management. As opposed to inactivity-based management. It's a legitimate choice!

ABM
Anti-Ballistic Missile. This is not an adjective for those opposed to Ballistic Missile. It is really the noun

anti-(Ballistic Missile) Missile.

There is an ABM treaty between the US and something called the USSR, that limited the deployment of ABM systems to two areas (subsequently one).

ABM
Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahmen. Germany's public works and retraining measures for the unemployed.

ABM
Asynchronous Balanced Mode. (Acronym used in IBM's HDLC, at least.)

ABMAT
A Bit More About That. I can find no evidence that anyone on the web uses this valuable acronym yet.

ABMC
American Battle Monuments Commission. In existence since 1923, it botched the design of the World War II Memorial on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C.

ABMC
Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center.

ABME
Annals of BioMedical Engineering. The journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES).

ABMO
AntiBonding Molecular Orbital (MO). Typically labelled by a superscript asterisk.

ABMOT
A Bit More On That. Look, let's not get promiscuous with the acronym neologizing, okay? Use ABMAT.

ABMP
American Board of Medical Physics. Run by the ACMP, it provides board certification for medical physicists.

ABMP
American Board of Medical Psychotherapists.

ABMR
Atomic-Beam Magnetic Resonance. A good way to make hfs measurements in the atomic ground state and in low-lying metastable states. See I. I. Rabi, S. Millman, P. Kusch and J. R. Zacharias, Physical Review 53, 318 (1938).

(That's right, 1938. Modern English was already spoken in that epoch.)

ABMS
Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation.

ABMS
American Board of Medical Specialties.

Loosely speaking, this also has something to do with the plural of ABM.

ABN
Advance Beneficiary Notice. Refers not to the notice itself but to a specific form signed to acknowledge that notice has been received. Then again, that form is also known as the ``ABN notice,'' which might be an unusual case of merely apparent but not manifest acronym-assisted pleonasm (usually abbreviated AAP pleonasm). That is, the proper term may be ``ABN notice,'' with ABN a sort of metonymic reference to it, or an indication of the fact that being given the form to sign may be the only notice beneficiaries are given of their impending financial obligation. Alternatively, you could regard ABN as an acronym for Advance Beneficiary Notice notice, and ``ABN notice'' as an AAP pleonasm pleonasm. The actual notification, if it ever occurred independently of the request to sign a form, could be ``AB'' for clarity.

Fascinating glossary entry so far, eh?

After plowing through that paragraph, you're probably desperate for substantive information about just what the ABN (or ABN notice) is about. Medicare requires that a doctor or other health care provider have the beneficiary sign an ABN to indicate that notification has been given that certain services to be rendered will probably not be paid for by Medicare (whether because it considers the service medically unnecessary or because it simply doesn't cover it).

The notification must be given in advance of the services. I suppose that under Medicare rules, in the absence of a signed ABN the patient cannot be held responsible for charges not reimbursed by Medicare. The ABN requirement applies only to patients in the Original Medicare Plan. It does not apply to those in a Medicare Managed Care Plan. It also does not apply to those not in any Medicare plan. I mean--what are you, crazy or something? You're dreamin'!

Some of you who are blissfully ignorant may be wondering about the word ``probably,'' but I've got stuff to do. I'll be back here soon.

[dive flag]

abolla
According to Pantologia (London, 1813),
a military garment, worn by the Greek and Roman soldiers: it was lined, or doubled, for warmth. There seem to have been different kinds of abollas, fitted to different occasions. Even kings appear to have used them: Caligula was affronted at king Ptolemy for appearing at the shows in a purple abolla, and by the eclat thereof turning the eyes of the spectators from the emperor upon himself.

It seems that even then, dressing in inappropriate military garb was a major fashion statement. Today, the abolla is mentioned in the Fashion Glossary of the ICCF&D. (``Roman military cloak, worn short in length, over one shoulder and fastened at the throat with a fibula.'')

And yet the Forthrights Phrontistery -- International House of Logorrhea includes it in a list of obscure words, even though it's defined in at least three on-line reference works!

ABoR
Academic Bill Of Rights. Also called ``Students' Bill of Rights,'' etc. Intended to try to produce a semblance of political balance on college campuses, as if even high school faculty were not already radicalized. Favorable and unfavorable arguments (with some rebuttal) can be found at the SAF site. The American Philosophical Association, like most established (or ``establishment,'' as we used to say in our protesting days) academic organizations (``tools of the oppressor'' or ``organs of the system''; I like ``tenured flunkies for the new leftist man'') are strongly opposed (the APA's arguments here).

The ABoR document at the SAF is mostly preamble, but when it gets to the nitty gritty, it encounters the same problems that we are all familiar with from older affirmative-action programs intended to try to produce some semblance of racial balance, or equality of opportunity or...

The first ``principle'' reads: ``All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.'' Making use of the distributive property and simplifying, we can summarize thus: hiring, firing, promotion and tenure decisions shall be made ``with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives,'' yet without being affected by employee's ``political or religious beliefs.''

There are other principles. They are idealistic.

abortient
A term in botany for flowers without seeds (from Latin abortiens).

About
Most programs have a pull-down menu item or a button you can push that tells you the name of the program and who wrote it. This feature is labeled ``About [program name].'' If you want to find out what the program does, just click on Help and skim the first 100 pages of the manual, and there's a good chance you'll learn enough About it to make an educated guess as to what it does. I wouldn't skip over the section on changing the background color; that's often the only part of the help pages that mentions what kinds of input and output the software takes and gives.

A. Bp.
Old abbreviation for an old archbishop. There probably aren't many young archbishops.

ABP
Androgen-Binding Protein. Similar to sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG).

Abp, Abp.
ArchBishoP. Sometimes the B is capitalized in the abbreviation (ABp.).

ABP
Arterial Blood Pressure.

ABPN
American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, Inc.

ABPP
American Board of Professional Psychology. ``We are a major player in the profession's interest in specialization.''

ABPP
Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry.

ABPsi
Association of Black Psychologists.

abpsy
abnormal psychology. Pronounced `ab-sigh.' David L. Gilles-Thomas's lecture notes for a full course are available on-line.

I think that someone who studies abnormal psychology is called a normal psychologist, but I haven't had a chance to check that.

ABPT
Association of Blind Piano Tuners. I guess there's one less distraction that way.

It's not widely known, and it probably isn't even true, that piano is very popular in the mountain kingdom of Bhutan (.bt). In fact, piano is probably the national sport. Once, the King of Bhutan heard of a man with perfect pitch and judgment, the best piano tuner in the world: Oppur Knockety. (For the purposes of this entry, we're going to assume Oppur Knockety is blind. It has some resonance.) For a great reward, the King persuaded Oppur Knockety to visit the palace and tune the King's own piano. When he was done, the piano sounded true and wonderful, better than one could have imagined that a piano could sound, before one heard this one.

That night, there was a great storm, and the next day, when the King sat down for his morning exercises, the piano was painfully out of tune. The King called for his men to bring back the tuner, to fix the piano, but they returned with only his solemn regret...

Oppur Knockety only tunes once.

You know, this guy reminds me of King Frederick the Great. He was a great patron of the sciences. Leonhard Euler spent twenty-five years as a guest in Frederick's court, which I suppose is why one of the most famous early problems in topology is the seven bridges of Königsberg (first capital of Prussia), except that Frederick the Great ascended the Prussian throne in 1740, and Euler treated this problem in 1735. Oh well. At the end of WWII, East Prussia became Russian and Polish territory, and Königsberg became Kaliningrad, Russia.

Seven Bridges Road, sung in occasionally a capella harmony, was a hit for The Eagles in 1968. Steve Young wrote it about a road by that (unofficial) name that leads out of Montgomery, Alabama into idyllic countryside by way of seven bridges.

There's also a parkway called Seven Bridges Road in Duluth, Minnesota. It has gone by a variety of names. Samuel Snively, the fellow who had the inspiration first to build it, and who got most of the original road built in 1899-1900, wanted to call it Spring Garden Boulevard, but that name never caught on. It follows Amity Creek and was best known as Amity Parkway, but it was also called Snively Road. It originally had ten wooden bridges, but these and the road generally fell into disrepair, until 1911-1912, when it was renovated and the original bridges were replaced. The renovation plan called for stone-arch bridges to replace the wooden ones, but one of these was downgraded to a less decorative iron-pipe-and-cement structure. Of the nine stone-arch bridges, the two at the upstream (Western) end fell into vehicular disuse, hence the current name. But it was never called Ten Bridges Road or Nine Bridges Road. Some numbers have more romance.

You know, on the subject of romance, it says here in the Columbia Encyclopedia that in 1733 the future King Frederick II ``married Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, but he separated from her shortly afterward and for the rest of his life showed no interest in women'' (my italics). Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.

In 2001 there was an incident in Bhutan involving royal marriage, and it turned out much worse. Oops, wrong Himalayan kingdom. It was Nepal.

As noted above, King Frederick II ascended the throne in 1740 -- he was known as Frederick the Great because his cynical, unscrupulous military adventures Greatly enlarged his kingdom. He was into all things French, and had a serious amateur interest in music. He played flute concertoes. As you may well imagine, in his court everyone absolutely loved flute concertoes. The King of Prussia was an absolute monarch.

The pianoforte (Italian for `gentle-strong') was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1709. The original name, eventually shortened to piano, stresses the respect in which it was a major improvement over its predecessor the harpsichord: it is possible to vary the volume (and duration) of a note. The piano supplanted the harpsichord over the course of the nineteenth century, growing in popularity even as it was still being perfected. Gottfried Silbermann, the foremost German organ builder of the time, worked at perfecting the instrument. Frederick the Great was his greatest supporter and customer -- he was said to have owned as many as fifteen Silbermann pianos. So much for the Bhutan connection.

Fritz had his court in Potsdam (I guess that explains the Euler topology thing), where Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (a son of the great Johann Sebastian, and no mean musician himself) was Capellmeister (`chapel-, i.e., choir-master'). C. P. E. Bach was one of the first major composers to write for the piano. In 1747, J. S. Bach paid a visit to King Frederick's court and tried out all the pianos. A bit more on that the RICERCAR entry.

abr.
ABRidged. Abbreviation used in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and elsewhere.

Sometimes terms like ``abridged'' are used where ``almost completely discarded'' would convey a more accurate idea. A paperback volume in the Milestones of Thought series from the Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. offers a good example. The front cover bears the title The Anatomy of Melancholy, a woodcut of a melancholy person, and the name of the author, Robert Burton. Below this: ``Abridged and Edited by Joan K. Peters.'' This handy volume is xviii+129 pages long. Not quite buried in the back-cover blurb and an introductory note is the information that the unabridged work is 1300 pages long. (The original and this have about the same count of words per page, within a few percent; so the text really is compressed by a factor of about 10.)

ABR
Accredited Buyer Representati{on|ve}. Real estate brokerage role.

ABR
The American Board of Radiology.

ABR
Available Bit Rate. A type of traffic management control defined within ATM. Appropriate for applications that send data in bursts and can wait for available bandwidth.

UBR (q.v.) and ABR are the two ATM ``best-effort'' service types, a sort of steerage class of data transmission, in which the network makes no absolute guarantee of cell delivery. In ABR, a minimum bit rate is guaranteed, and an effort is made to keep cell loss low.

ABRA
Asociación de Bancos de la República Argentina. `Association of Banks of the Republic of Argentina.' That's not banks as in the shores of the Río de la Plata. That's banks where you store your plata (literally `silver,' but commonly used as a synonym of dinero). Then when the economy collapses, the government finds ways to prevent you getting your money back, except eventually, and in officially as well as unoffically shrunken form. Argentines who really have money, of course, just keep the loose change in domestic banks and the bulk off-shore.

Of course, in principle it could also mean `association of [park] benches of the Republic of Argentina.' Managing money requires the exercise of sound judgment. In Argentina today, investing in park benches (and charging rent, collectable in hard currency) might be the way to go.

Spanish is one of those languages that, with no offense intended, physicists refer to as `highly degenerate.' Words have many meanings (acepciones). I suppose you could apply the same term to languages in which words have many spellings (which should be called heterographs). It's a transferred sense of the physics adjective degenerate (German vielfach), describing an eigenvalue (most often an energy eigenvalue) corresponding to more than one eigenstate. I don't mind giving clear and thorough explanations. It just happens that I don't.

In 1998, ABRA closed, after a fashion, merging with ADEBA (details there) to form ABA.

abra
Silver Polish coin (no, I mean a Polish coin made of silver). Seems to be out of circulation now. In 1813 or so, according to Pantologia, it was worth about one (English) shilling.

abra
Spanish, `open.' To be specific, it is one of the singular forms that occurs in the conjugation of the verb abrir (`to open'). For example, English ``that he open it'' would be translated ``que lo abra,'' and the command ``open the cadaver'' (whatever that might mean) becomes ``abra el cadáver.'' (That's the ``polite'' form.) It makes ``abracadabra'' oddly suggestive the first time one hears it. One might also think of ``abra cada brama'' (`open each rutting season' as a command rather than the sort of thing you would put as a sign at your campgrounds), but accentual stress falls on the first syllable of each of these three Spanish words. Of course, to most Spanish speakers the English word abracadabra mostly just evokes the word that has the same meaning in Spanish (written abracadabra) (also).

A near homonym of abra is habrá (the only phonemic difference is that the stress falls on the first syllable in the first word and the second syllable in the second word). Habrá is a form of the verb haber, and means, in certain contexts, `there will be' or `will have to.'

abra
Spanish noun for any of various sorts of opening (bay, dale, fissure, window pane) not described as an apertura.

abra
There used to be a duplicate entry here, inserted by accident. In order, however, to avoid wasting your precious time, we have ruthlessly removed it.

abracadabra
According to the Pantologia (London, 1813),
a magical word, recommended by Serenus Samonicuss as an antidote against agues and several other diseases. It was to be written upon a piece of paper as many times as the word contains letters, omitting the last letter of the former every time, and then suspended about the neck by a linen thread. Abracadabra was the name of the a god worshipped by the Syrians.

Thank God we've gotten away from all that nonsense!

ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A

Abrams, Elliot
A WBEN weather reporter. Who did you think?

Actually, I've been away from Buffalo, and I've heard his name in Pittsburgh and around Ohio. Someone ought to look into this.

[Later:] It turns out that he provides weather reports for many different radio stations. His hardest job is keeping straight which personality he's supposed to use with which station.

abril
`April,' in Spanish and Portuguese.

Abril
The name of a Brazilian publisher. Verily clever. The cover of its magazine Veja has a small block of text in the upper right, with ABRIL in all-caps and the date in lower case (same font).

abs
ABdominal muscleS. They can be as tight as a drum, but the spare tire is stored on top, so you'd never know. To show them off you have to lose fat. To lose weight without loss of muscle mass, make sure you get enough dietary chromium (say 200 mcg/day) in a form that is biologically available (as the chelate: chromium picolinate).

Abs.
Absender. German for `sender.' Or `sender-offer' if you prefer. Cf. Abg.

abs, abs.
ABSolute. Generally contrasted with relative, or scaled, or normalized.... One less obvious and fortunately obsolete usage was associated with the old cgs unit systems, and is described at the ab- entry.

abs.
ABSolute[ly]. A grammatical term referring to modifiers (adjectives and adverbs). The absolute form of a modifier is the ordinary or noncomparative form, it states a property without indicating a comparison or degree. In English and other Germanic languages, the absolute form is contrasted with comparative (comp.) and superlative (superl.) forms. For example:
red (abs.),
redder or more red (comparative form),
and
reddest or most red (superlative form).

In prescriptive or ``school'' grammars, the absolute form of a modifier is more commonly called the positive form. In the literature of linguistics, positive and absolute are probably used to a comparable degree.

An absolute adjective is one that has no -- or logically should have no -- comparative forms. Dead is a pretty good example. One can get into arguments about this, but they rapidly get philosophical. Whether an adjective is absolute or not is a question of the assumptions underlying its semantics. These may not be shared, and one can question them, but we all recognize the humor or oddity of characterizing a woman as less pregnant or a quartet as fourer. Absolute adjectives are rarely called positive adjectives.

One of the more irritating semantic abuses is the description of some item being hawked as ``very unique.'' In principle, one could argue that uniqueness is not an either-or thing, that unique is not an absolute adjective but rather describes a quality more like unusualness. But we already have the word unusual, and the salesman doesn't want to use it. He recognizes that ``unique'' is a more powerful word, indicating something beyond merely unusual. Even that advertising whore has an inchoate sense that unique is an absolute adjective. (Give that man an ADDY.) His promiscuous, meretricious use of the word in a superlative form abases it, churning the vocabulary hierarchy and forcing us to establish new words for him to abase.

Grammatical rules are a bit like poetic scansion. Perfect meter in poetry, and perfect adherence to grammatical rules in prose, can become tired. A little deviation is spicy. But it is spicy only because the frame of order is present to play off of. It is a good thing occasionally to form the comparative or superlative of an absolute adjective. If you break the rule systematically, however, you find little joy left in the breaking, and the language poorer.

ABS, abs
ABSolute value. Common name for absolute value function, in computing and sometimes in mathematics [where |.| is more common than abs(.) is]. In computer programming languages ``abs'' may also be used for the modulus of a complex number.

One can compute the maximum function from the absolute value function and vice versa. For two real numbers r and s:

abs(r) = max(-r,r) .
max(r,s) = [ r + s + abs(r-s) ] / 2 .

Maximum functions of more arguments can be generated by successive comparisons from maximum functions of fewer arguments, using the fact that

max(r1, ..., rN, rN+1) = max( max(r1, ..., rN) , rN+1) .

Equivalent statements apply for the minimum function, since

min(r1, ..., rN) = - max(-r1, ..., -rN) .

ABS
Acrylonitrile/Butadiene/Styrene copolymer (a ``terpolymer''). Often described as ``high-impact.'' CycolacGE) is one. San Diego Plastics, Inc. has a short page of information on ABS.

Compare AAS.

ABS
AlkylBenzene Sulfonate.

ABS
Alternate Billing Service.

ABS
American Back Society. Passing by on my way to write another glossary entry, I'm a bit surprised I didn't make some remark about this entry when I first put it in.

ABS
American Bible Society. Offices at 1865 Broadway, sin city.

ABS
American Board of Sexology.

Alice Cooper's lyrics run through my mind -- ``I wanna be elected!''

ABS
American Board of Surgery.

ABS
Animal Behavior Society. ``The purpose of this society is to promote and encourage the biological study of animal behavior in the broadest sense, including studies at all levels of organization using both descriptive and experimental methods under natural and controlled conditions.'' I suppose anthropology should be a subfield.

ABS
Antilock Braking System. It sometimes occurs in the AAPleonastic form ``ABS Braking System'' (likewise in the language-disguised form ``sistema frenante ABS'' in Italian and Spanish). A much more common acronym AAP is ``ABS System,'' which has the advantage of also being redundant when ABS takes the German expansion ``Anti-Blockier-System.'' ABS operates by sensing a skid (one wheel turning much more slowly than others) and releasing the brake momentarily to reestablish traction. This all happens repeatedly, on a tenth-of-a-second time scale. It demonstrably improves braking on slippery surfaces, and so in principle it ought to reduce accident rates. However, early data fail to show this; it's a mystery why. One hypothesis is that people get overconfident. I have to admit that I have sensed a tendency on my own part to go a little faster on slippery surfaces and rely a little on the ABS. But I realize now that that is quite wrong. I don't have to admit it. I'll take moral hazards over road hazards any day.

Allied Signal Corporation, based in Morristown, NJ, started talks with ABS manufacturer Bosch of Germany in Fall 1995, in hopes of collaborating to improve the performance of its brake division, which manufactured ordinary brakes. They ended up selling the division to Bosch.

Allied has facilities in the Buffalo area, but that's not where it's at; Allied had the brake stuff from the former Bendix Corporation. (You know: George Schultz's old company; you remember George Schultz -- one of Reagan's Secretaries of State? One who didn't say ``I'm in control here''?) Anyway, Bendix used to be a big presence in the South Bend area -- there's even a local ``Bendix Woods'' county park. At the end of Bendix Road, just north of the Amtrak station, there's an empty shell of a building that used to house the brake factory. Bosch uses some of the building for office space. Tim -- he lived upstairs from me -- works there. He's a mechanical engineer (MechE).

I guess you really didn't need to know about Bendix Woods, huh?

A rare alternative expansion of ABS is ``automatic braking system,'' but it's best to leave that for the rail and air transport braking systems, which are not antilock systems.

ABS
Artificial Biosynthesis of Sugar.

ABS
Average Busy Stream.

ABSAME
Association for the Behavioral Sciences and Medical Education.

[phone icon]

ABSBH
Average Busy Season Busy Hour.

Traditionally, Mother's Day has the heaviest phone traffic of the year.

ABSCISSA
A Bore that Should Cease Is Stupid, Silly Acronyms. This acronym was coined by Bob Cunningham as an expression of contempt for contrived acronyms; he mentioned it on a.u.e on August 27, 2003. The acronym's expansion is useful as a mnemonic for the spelling of abscissa. This also works with the more natural-sounding silly-stupid order.

absissa
This entry is here because I can never remember how to spell abscissa.

ABSM
American Board of Sleep Medicine.

absolute zero (of temperature)
The following explanation of absolute zero and zero-point energy is slightly modified from one dashed off with the intention of being comprehensible by a high-school graduate. I am informed that I overshot the target level. FWIW...

Zero temperature and zero-point energy are related concepts, but the first can be described independently of the second.

Briefly: a system is said to be at absolute zero temperature when all possible energy has been sucked out of it.

Classically (i.e., within a classical physics/classical mechanics description), you expect that you could always extract all the kinetic energy from a system and leave it at minimum potential energy. Quantum mechanically, we know that's not true. Zero-point energy is the classically unexpected minimum energy, or minimum kinetic energy.

You can see zero-point energy as a consequence of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. For simplicity we consider a system that consists of a single particle in a potential well, but the argument generalizes (see STAFF for a less ordinary instance of the same concepts). Suppose you did manage to remove all the kinetic energy from a system. Then the momentum would be known exactly (it would have to be zero). But if the potential energy has a minimum at a particular point (the usual situation except in vacuum or symmetric situations) then the position at absolute zero would be known exactly too -- the particle would be exactly at the place where the potential is minimum. So if you could remove all the energy, you would know both position and momentum exactly. This volates the uncertainty principle, so the tentative assumption is wrong. Conclusion: you cannot remove all the kinetic energy from a system. This argument can be quantified to give estimates of the zero point energy that are good to exact.

To understand all the energy in macroscopic systems, you have to use thermodynamics or statistics, because there are too many (microscopic) degrees of freedom. The only exception is zero temperature, when there is so little energy that the number of accessible states (talking QM, of course) is small. So certain calculations that don't involve statistical ensembles (explicitly as stat mech or implicitly as thermo) are said to be done at ``zero temperature,'' even though nonzero temperature only makes strict sense as a concept if you do have thermal ensembles.

Calculating the ground state energy of a hydrogen atom is an ordinary non-statistical quantum mechanics problem. When you recognize that mechanics is zero-temperature statistical mechanics (as partly explained in the previous paragraph), you realize that the ground-state energy of an atom is its "zero-point energy." Here is a mathematical problem to avoid discussing. I said earlier that the sero-point energy is the minimum [QM-attainable] energy or the minimum kinetic energy. For a classical atom, the minimum energy is minus infinity (atoms are classically unstable -- they collapse), so the zero-point energy, measured from the classical minimum, is positive infinity. So "zero-point" energy is not always well-defined. If you stick to systems that are classically stable, like springs or phonons, you can say zero-point energy is kinetic energy. When QM is the reason for a classical system to be stable at all, z.p. isn't k.e.

ABSP
Association of British Scrabble Players.

absurdity
Absurdity is in the details.

A bald absurdity is just an error. A detailed absurdity is Humor.

Also in the details: God, the devil.

Saint Augustine wrote, `I believe because it is absurd.'

Many churches provide weekly messages of spiritual uplift on their outdoor marquee billboards. It is reliably and corroborably reported that some time before the millennium, a church marquee in Nashville proclaimed the following consolation:

THE FART OF GOD
IS DIVINE WIND

ABT
Advanced Backplane Technology.

ABT
Advanced BiCMOS Technology.

ABT
Air-Breathing Threat. Jets and cruise missiles, as opposed to ballistic missiles (rockets).

ABT
American Ballet Theatre.

ABT
The Aramaic Bible (The Targums).

ABTA
Association of British Travel Agents.

ABTA
Australian Baton Twirling Association. ``Twirling Australia.'' Gee, with the Coriolis forces changed around, it must be pretty tough to switch hemispheres! Associated with the WBTF.

ABTE/ETL
Advanced BiCMOS Technology / Enhanced Transceiver Logic.

ABTUK
Associated Baton Twirlers of the United Kingdom. For similar organizations, see the majorette entry.

ABU
Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union.

Abu Amar
Yassir Arafat's nom de guerre. Amar is Spanish: `to love.' I don't think that's what it means in Arabic.

ABV
Alcohol (percentage) By Volume. Expanded in speech, 46ABV is ``46 per cent alcohol by volume,'' often with per cent or alcohol implicit.

ABVP
American Board of Veterinary Practitioners, Inc.

ABVS
Audit Bureau of Verification Services.

ABVT
American Board of Veterinary Toxicology. I understand that some dogs can eat a little bit of chocolate.

ABWA
American Business Women's Association. (Their spacing and nonhyphenation.)

ABWR
Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (BWR). Expresso!

[column]

Abzu
Guide to internet resources on the ancient Near East. They sort of explain what abzu, an Assyrian or Sumerian word, means. I bet they don't even know themselves. Now Abzu (in existence since 1994) seems to be ``ETANA's guide to the ancient Near East on-line.'' (ETANA has been in existence since about 2000.) Who pays the piper calls the tune.

.ac.
(Domain code for) ACademic institution. Used under national domains that are organized hierarchically both under the British (.uk) scheme (second-level domains a mix of two- and three-letter abbreviations: .ac., .co., .gov., .net., .org. -- it's so English to be unsystematic) and under the Japanese (.jp) scheme (.ac., .co., .go., .ne., .or. -- it's so Japanese to be systematically obscure).

I'm aware that .ac. is used (in addition to the U.K. and Japan) in Austria (.at), Belgium (.be), Costa Rica (.cr), Israel (.il, South Korea (.kr), New Zealand (.nz), and South Africa (.za).

Under national domains that don't have an .ac. second-level domain, like those of France (.fr) and Germany (.de), universities very often have domain names indicating the type of institution.

Most US universities, and a number of non-US universities, have subdomains in the .edu top-level domain.

AC
Access Control. (In a token-ring system or any other network with some kind of collision avoidance.)

A/C
AcCount.

Ac
ACet{ ate | ic | yl }. Productive, as in AcOEt (ethyl acetate) or PVAc (polyvinyl acetate).

AC
Acromio-Clavicular (joint).

Ac
Actinium, element number 89. Not to be confused with the related An (a generic actinide) or unrelated Ac (acetate, etc.) Learn more (about actinium) at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

AC
Activated Carbon. Not ``activated'' in the Arrhenius sense.

Ac
ACts of the Apostles. An NT book.

ac
ACute. Medical abbreviation for a word that as used means approximately rapid and not chronic. Nothing to do with a cute anything. More closely related to ack.

The conventional sense of acute is broader, and includes extreme, or severe.

AC
Adenylate Cyclase.

AC
Adult Contemporary. A music category tracked by BillBoard. Somewhat slow -- music and popularity shifts both. For a song to stay six months at #1 on the AC chart is not unusual. Savage Garden had its hit (``Truly Madly Deeply'') at #1 for most of 1998. For contemporary adults who understand that lay is the infinitive of a transitive verb, 1998 was a galling year.

AC
Advanced CMOS (logic family). Also ACL. One-micron technology. Cf. ACT. This page from TI.

AC, A/C
AirCraft. That's what it means in aviation industries, but there seem to be other meanings as well.

AC, A/C
Air Conditioning. (The target condition is cooler.) Another short form of this term is eakon, the Japanese word meaning the same thing. See perm for a small number of other examples.

AC, ac, A.C., a.c., A.-C., a.-c.
Alternating Current. For information on the various abbreviations, see the DC entry.

[column]

AC, a.c.
Ante Cibum. Latin, `before meal.' Lower-case form is standard in medical prescriptions.

A.C.
Antes de Cristo. Spanish and Portuguese, `before Christ' (B.C.). Italian is similar. Cf. D.C.

AC
Anthony and Cleopatra. It ended badly, but eventually Shakespeare made a play about it, so it's okay. The abbreviation usually refers to the play, at least in the sort of stuff I read.

AC
Application Context.

A-C
Asbestos-Cement.

You know, this looks like a somewhat slow-news part of the glossary, so I'm going to take the opportunity to lay out our grand plan. Briefly, our long-term objective is to reach the point where every entry is necessary for every other entry -- i.e., every entry is reachable by a sequence of links from any other entry. Just think how convenient it will be! With just a few thousand mouseclicks, you'll be able to get from any entry to any other entry. Wow and amen. To achieve this vision in a short amount of time, we're going to start inserting a few more links whose relevance is not immediately evident.

A.C., a.c., AC
Asociación Civil. Spanish for `civic organization.' The abbreviation appears at the end of the names of many Mexican nonprofits. It seems to be a part of legal terminology there, a strictly delineated class of nonprofit corporation. I've seen organizations with A.C. or its expansion in the names of one organization each in Argentina, Bolivia, and Venezuela. I suspect that in these cases the term is simply descriptive in the usual loose way and does not have the legal significance it has in Mexico, but that's just a guess.

AC
Assistant Commissioner. Assistant police commissioner, at least.

-AC
Automatic Computer. Popular ending on early computer names. See Woz entry for list.

AC
Axiom of Choice.

As you may have noticed, none of the AC entries is for a word as such, but rather for an abbreviation pronounced as an initialism (typically ``ay cee'') or a symbol. Hence, none of them is a valid Scrabble® word. Gratifyingly, all three major Scrabble dictionaries agree. Robert Frost observed that writing blank verse is like playing tennis without a net. Playing Scrabble with all marginally defensible words allowed is similar sport.

ACA
Air Care Alliance. ``[A] nationwide league of humanitarian flying organizations whose volunteer pilots are dedicated to community service.''

ACA
American Camping Association. Consider spending your Winnebago vacation at Chéticamp, in exotic but not-too-exotic Canada. See the NS entry in particular. Yes, go! Read it. Persistence is rewarded.

ACA
American Cartographic Association. Name of an old member organization of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM). Around the turn of this century, the ACA disappeared and a new member organization emerged in its place, called the Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS). It had been my impression that as part of this process, the Geographic and Land Information Society also disappeared. Possibly some members of the GLIS switched to the new CaGIS, or perhaps something more interesting happened, but the GLIS persists.

ACA
American Chiropractic Association.

ACA
American Communication Association. ``American'' in the continental sense -- Western Hemispheric.

ACA
American Council on Alcoholism. (Don't let that ``on'' fool ya'. They're agin' it.)

ACA
American Counseling Association.

ACA
American Crystallographic Association. Web site provided by the Hauptman-Woodward (Medical Research) Institute. (Used to be the Medical Foundation of Buffalo.)

ACA
Amputee Coalition of America. ``Our Mission: To reach out to people with limb loss and empower them through education, support, and advocacy.'' Did they have to use the expression ``reach out''? It reminds me of the dating-game parody in ``Kentucky Fried Movie.'' The third contestant ignores the question and instead starts spouting the slogans of the personality cult of the local leader. He's on a roll, it looks like they may let him live, but then he concludes his peroration with a call for the crowd to give their fearless leader (present for the show) ``a big hand.'' The leader lacks a right hand. Oops.

ACA
Anisotropically Conductive Adhesive.

ACA
Association Canadienne d'Acoustique. The CAA, q.v.

ACA
Association of Canadian Advertisers.

ACA
Association of Canadian Archivists.

ACA
Association of Chartered Accountants. Unh-unh. You want the ACCA.

ACA
Atlanta College of Art.

[column]

ACA
Atlantic Classical Association (of Canada).

ACA
Automatic Circuit Assurance. A PBX feature to help identify malfunctioning trunk lines. This is not the usual kind of trunk (vide TCT) but a tie trunk (between two PBX's) or a PBX trunk, which connects the PBX to a commercial central office.

ACA
Automobile Club of America.

acac
ACetylACetonate. CH3COCHCOCH3.

Cf. ack-ack.

ACACC
Association des Cartothèques et Archives Cartographiques du Canada. See ACMLA. Also see ack-ack, because you only go around once in this life, so you've got to grab for all the gusto you...this is beginning to sound like a beer advertisement.

ACACD
American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders. It's not exactly a ``college'' in any of the usual senses. It's a vendor of courses in continuing education originally taught primarily by Jay M. Holder. ACACD and Holder have earned the attention of Quackwatch. Featured treatments include hammering on your spine and acupuncturing your ear. Linked from their list of schools unaccredited by any credible accreditor, here are ``Some Notes on the Activities and Credentials of Jay M. Holder, D.C..'' Read'em and weep. You might suppose that a barbaric monstrosity of a word like ``addictionology'' would clue people, but ACACD is still in business. As of this writing, they're planning to hold an event in Las Vegas, May 22-25, 2009. If this ``medicine'' doesn't make you sick, see this AAA entry.

ACAD
American Conference of Academic Deans. (Note that, with very little effort, this could be made into a perfectly irritating little XARA.) ``ACAD members are current and former deans, provosts, academic vice presidents, and other academic [low-lifes and trouble-makers] at colleges and universities inside and outside the US.''

This isn't meant as a criticism, but it's interesting to note that ``inside and outside the US'' is not uninformative. And that's true whether or not ``inside'' and ``outside'' are understood as the mathematical interior of a proper set and its complement (so their boundary in ordinary topologies is a nonempty closed set).

According to Aerosmith's ``Living On The Edge,''

There's somethin' wrong with the world today --
The light bulb's gettin' dim.
There's meltdown in the skah - ah - eye!

Personally, I would have preferred nonsense syllables. I mean -- nonsense syllables that don't sound like they're supposed to mean anything. Nonsense syllables that don't mention Chicken Little. Ideally, it would be an instrumental with or without howling noises. They also state: ``Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah....'' Yeah, well: living in the edge -- now there's a challenge.

academism
In the English-speaking world, this is recogized as a variant of academicism. In Japan, however, academism is the standard term. I'm not sure whether it's wasei eigo or just an accident of some sort.

ACAG
Anti-Censorship Action Group. A South African NGO merged into FXI in January 1994.

ACAOM
Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Formerly the National Accreditation Commission for Schools and Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NACSCAOM), which was established in June 1982 by the Council of Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (CCAOM).

ACAP
Aviation Consumer Action Project.

I never thought of myself as a consumer of aviation service. Is this something that might get used up? Get a load of me -- I'm consuming aviation!

In an alternate world, Nick is bouncing the cash drawer in and out. ``Hey, get a load of me! I'm givin' out wings!''

Cash registers were originally invented to make sure the hired help didn't embezzle. The bell was added to make non-use of the register obvious (by silence).

ACARS
Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. Somewhat less common (roughly a quarter of the ghits) is the expansion with the singular-form ``communication''; I don't which -- if precisely one -- is official.

ACAS
(UK) Arbitration and Conciliation Advisory Service.

ACAT
Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology.

ACATS
(US) Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service.

ACAUS
Association of Chartered Accountants in the United States.

ACB
Adjusted Cost Base. A precise technical term in Canadian income-tax computation, specifically for computing capital gains amd losses. It's the total cost of an asset, adjusted to uh, in a way so as to, uh... It's the usual impenetrable taxation mess. Here's one mutual fund's futile attempt to show how simple it all really is. Revenue Canada (which isn't called Revenue Canada any more) obfuscates it here.

The expression ``adjusted cost base'' is also used loosely elsewhere for total cost base and average cost base.

ACB
American Council for the Blind. Their pages don't have a lot of fancy graphics, I notice.

They claim to be ``the nation's leading membership organization of blind and visually impaired people.'' They also claim that ``[i]t was founded in 1961 and incorporated in the District of Columbia'' as if this was anything I had a hankering to know. People should have a sense of proportion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ACB
Association of Clinical Biochemists. It ``was founded in 1953, and is one of the oldest such Associations in the world. Based in the United Kingdom, it is a professional body dedicated to the practice and promotion of clinical science. The Association has medical and non-medical members in all major UK healthcare laboratories, in many university departments and in several commercial companies. The links with its Corporate Members leads to a fruitful relationship with the clinical diagnostics industry. The Association liaises with and is consulted by many national and international organisations on issues relating to Clinical Biochemistry.''

ACB
Average[d] Cost Base.

ACBL
American Contract Bridge League. Main organizer of duplicate bridge clubs and tournaments in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda.

Bermuda?

ACBL ``is the governing body for organized bridge activities and promotion on the North American continent'' as far as the WBF sees it. That is, the ACBL is the WBF's zonal organization for zone 2, the second-largest zone, membershipwise, after Europe (vide EBL).

There's a separate organization called the American Bridge Association (ABA). In the bad old days, ACBL was for whites and ABA was for blacks. Both still exist as independent leagues.

ACBP
Associations Comprehensive Benefits Program.

I found this entry and the next while trying to see if there wasn't a bomber version of the ACFP.

ACBP
Atlantic City Beach Patrol.

Acc
ACCommodation. Medical term for what you need, conditional on your spending time at a medical convention. No wait! I think I garbled that. Maybe it's a conventional term for what happens when you spend a long time with a medical condition, and your body adjusts. Like favoring your gimpy leg. One of those definitions is probably right. I'll get back to this entry later.

ACC
Accident Compensation Corporation. As this now-empty page used to say, ACC ``administers New Zealand's accident compensation scheme, which provides personal injury cover for all New Zealand citizens, residents and temporary visitors to New Zealand. In return people do not have the right to sue for personal injury, other than for exemplary damages.'' Well, ``in return'' there's that and also the little matter of ``ACC levies.''

ACC
Adaptive Cruise Control. Its principal ``feature'' is that it slows down to maintain distance from vehicle ahead. As the late Dale Earnhardt would have said, ``better soak a rag in kerosene and wrap it around your ankles to keep the ants from eating your candy ass.''

ACC
Air Combat Command.

ACC
American Crafts Council.

ACC
The Animal Concerns Community.

ACC
Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

ACC
Arab Cooperation Council. Headed by an Egyptian, headquartered in Amman (Jordan). Did Iraq really never stop being a member?

ACC
Joyce ACC?

ACC
Atlantic Coast Conference. This is the kind of conference where academic institutions present the results of their research in a form of multimedia presentation called ``games.''

ACC
Austin Community College.

ACC
Australian Copyright Council.

ACC
Autoclaved Cellular Concrete.

ACC
Automotive Composites Consortium. A consortium within USCAR. Formed in August 1988. It's about polymer composites.

ACCA
Advisory Committee on Council Activities. A standing committee of the NCEES (that ``Council''). ``Provides advice and briefing to the Board of Directors on new policy issues, problems, and plans that warrant preliminary assessment of policy choices and procedures. Consultants shall have served on the Board of Directors. Consists of a chair and members from each zone--one is a land surveyor.''

ACCA
Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America. Founded in 1919, it became a member of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States (founded 1912). The ACCA served some of the functions, particularly for wartime government-industry coordination, that the MAA served earlier. After WWII, the ACCA changed its name a couple of times, and is now known as the Aerospace Industries Association of America, Inc. (AIA).

ACCA
Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.

ACCC
American Council of Christian Churches.

ACCCIM
Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce & Industry Malaysia. Cf. MCCM.

ACCE
American Chamber of Commerce Executives. This is the name that survived the 2003 ``merger'' of the ACCE and the National Association of Membership Directors (NAMD). NAMD became a division of ACCE and was renamed the National Alliance for Membership Development (NAMD).

acceleration pedal
Misspelling of exhilaration pedal.

ACCELS
American Council for Collaboration in Education and Language Study. Sounds so much more two-way and respectfully cooperative than the ``American Council of Teachers of Rooshyan'' (ACTR) that gave rise to it, and to which organization it is closely tied. (They share a website.) Broader implied agenda, too. ACCELS is described as having ``become a leader among all U.S. organizations in the administration of U.S. government-funded exchanges in the humanities, social sciences, economics, business, law, public administration, and educational administration.''

Oh great: in 1998 there was a reorganization. ACTR and ACCELS became councils under an umbrella organization called ``American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS.'' Frequent name changes and the creation of multiple sealed acronyms (or names that, confusingly, may or may not be sealed acronyms) are usually a sign of poor planning or at least poor branding, but the group claims here that it's a sign of success. During this period of great success, Russian has maintained US high-school student enrollments in the range of 10 to 15 thousand. (Due to a surge in Japanese language study, Russian fell from sixth-most-studied foreign language in US high schools to seventh.)

accent
Here is a supply of accents:
Acute: ´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´
Grave: ```````````````````````````
Unsorted: ´`´``´```````´°´´```´"´``´`
In case of emergency, smash screen and affix as needed.

Vietnamese has upwards of forty (40) (!) distinguishable vowels. You better believe Vietnamese are not always fastidious about accents. Vide VISCII.

Seriously, I find that sometimes (like right now) I'm on a public machine that has been cleverly sabotaged to prevent me from easily entering special characters. For such moments, it's useful to have those characters together to cut and paste from a single place.

For Spanish, I need
¡ ¿ Á É Í Ó Ú á é í ó ú ü ª º Ñ ñ
Maybe this will turn out to be more convenient over time:
¡¿ÁmásÉnéstÍpísÓnósÚrúngüi
1ª 2º Ñañ güe ación

German:
Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü ß
ÄuÖlÜberschäuönülaß

acception
An old form of the word acceptation. In both forms, the word refers to meanings: acception is either the action or practice of accepting a meaning for a word, or a word's accepted meaning. It tends to be implicit that the acception of a word is singular, that all of the accepted senses of a word cohere in some way to a single inclusive sense: definitions of the word invariably refer to ``the meaning'' rather than ``a meaning'' of a word. If Anglophones didn't expect most words to have a single essential meaning, but instead expected multiple unrelated meanings, then the meaning of the words acception and acceptation would probably have evolved into something like that of their Spanish cognate acepción.

I should probably concede that there are a couple of subtle difficulties here: To discuss how many meanings a word has, one has to try to be precise about what constitute distinct meanings, and what constitute distinct words. If one can't answer the first question, one can't say whether a word has multiple meanings. If one can't answer the second question, one can't say whether the different meanings belong to the same word. What is worse, the question of distinguishing meanings complicates discussion here more fundamentally: one could regard English acception and Spanish acepción as having the same meaning, and claim that only the contexts differ. This is probably one of the worst entries in which to ponder this issue, since the words being examined are part of the vocabulary of the discussion. (Philosophers call this ``building a boat at sea.'') When I discuss it, or find a discussion, at some other entry, I'll place a link to that discussion here.

The second difficulty, what one means by the word word, is not so straightforward to address as one might at first suppose. There is some support for views at opposite extremes. For example, different spellings usually imply different words, but some English words have multiple accepted spellings. Moreover, it is accepted to say that the different conjugations of a verb are different forms of a single ``word'' (e.g., eat, eats, ate, eaten, eating). (You guessed right, I'm eating this, I mean writing this, on an empty stomach.)

Back later.

ACCHAN
Allied (i.e. NATO) Command CHANnel.

ACCI
Australian Computing and Communications Institute.

ACCIS
Automated Command and Control Information System.

ACCJC
Oh -- you want the WASC-ACCJC.

ACCN
Activated Cloud Condensation Nuclei.

ACCNA
Articulating Crane Council of North America. ``[F]ormed to promote and serve the common interests of articulating crane manufacturers in the development and sale of safe, efficient and useful products''; became an NTEA affiliate in Fall 1992.

ACCP
Alliance for Cervical Cancer Prevention.

ACCP
American College of Chest Physicians.

ACCP
American College of Clinical Pharmacology.

ACCP
American College of Clinical Pharmacy.

ACCP
The Association of AS/400 Corporate Computing Professionals, Inc. An all-volunteer, ``non-profit organization of San Francisco Bay Area professionals'' that wisely omitted the machine name (AS/400) from its organization name, and is now gracefully transitioning to The Association of iSeries Corporate Computing Professionals, Inc. (ACCP).

ACCPR
Adjacent Channel Coupled Power Ratio. Specifically a measure of interference rather than noise.

accrual date
An interest accrual date is the date that interest charges on a loan begin to accrue. Outside of civil suits, the context is usually adequate to allow this to be called simply an accrual date. In torts, the accrual date is the date of the action or event causing the injury for which a claim is brought. (``Injury'' is used in the technical sense -- encompassing personal injury, loss, damage, etc. for which claimant seeks to recover damages.)

ACCS
Air Command and Control System. (NATO acronym.)

ACCT
Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television. It must have seemed a clever acronym at some point, but the website only uses ``the Academy'' (and ``l'Académie'').

acct.
ACCounT[ant].

ACCU
Association of C and C++ Users. ``...a non-commercial organisation based in the United Kingdom [so book prices are in the exotic unit of pounds; then again, that's how many of us measure the value of books] and run by people interested in the C family of programming languages.''

accused of allegedly
Accused of. People with an uncertain grasp of their language might think that since words have meaning, more words have more meaning, so pile it on! Then again, maybe they don't think. In fact, when redundant or inappropriate qualification is added to an expression that is accurate without it, the fact of the qualification adds only the information about the speaker or writer, rather than about the subject described. And the information is not good. Cf. high rate of speed.

[phone icon]

ACD
Automatic Call Distribut{ion | or}. Please hold. Calls are answered in the order received. (``Your call will be answered in the order that it was received.'')

ACDA
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the US government. The ACDA was established by an act of Congress of September 26, 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2561); it became part of the State Department on April Fool's Day of 1999. An archive of the old ACDA site formerly located at <http://www.acda.gov> is now maintained as part of the Electronic Research Collections (ERC) of historic State Department materials by the federal depository library at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In the Clinton administration, the former ACDA came under the policy oversight of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, its activities split among four bureaus: Arms Control, Nonproliferation, Political-Military Affairs, Verification and Compliance. The State Department maintains ``a permanent electronic archive of information released prior to'' dubya's inauguration. The current (April 2003) page for that Under Secretary seems to imply that the Bureau of Verification and Compliance reports to the Under Secretary but is not under that official's policy oversight. (This probably reflects its intended independence as the source of reports to Congress, including the ``President's Annual Report to Congress on Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control Agreements.'')

AC/DC
A Rock group. This site has lyrics to some of the songs.

The editorial we used to use the expression ``AC/DC'' to mean `swing[s] both ways.' We meant ``swing'' in a highly specific way.

AC/DC can also refer to the standard alternatives in electric power: alternating and direct current (AC and DC, resp.). In Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and probably quite a few other Romance languages, AC/DC suggests the standard alternatives in dating, but not swinging.

ACE
Accelerated College Enrollment. Thanks to the Huskins Bill, North Carolina community colleges can offer ``college courses'' to high school students, usually on their high school campuses. SCC, for example, offers Precal Algebra and Precal Trig to high school juniors and seniors.

This is brilliant! Given that community colleges award ``college credit'' for what is essentially remedial education in high school subjects, why not begin remediation before it's necessary?

The next bright idea: cut out the junior-college middleman! Allow high schools, usually on their own high school campuses, to offer HS-level courses to high school students! Brilliantissimo!

ACE
Accumulated Cyclone Energy. The ACE index is normally described as ``a wind energy index.'' It is defined as the sum of the squares of the estimated 6-hourly maximum sustained surface wind speed (in knots) for all named systems while they are at least of tropical-storm strength. If the overall velocity profile of any storm scales approximately linearly with the maximum sustained surface wind speed, then the ACE index ought to scale approximately with the total kinetic energy of the cyclones. The ACE index is normally stated not in square knot units (I had to write that) but as a percentage of its median value.

ACE
Advanced Certificate in Education.

ACE
Advanced Composition Explorer. A space mission, not some atonal composer.

ACE
Advanced Computing Environment. Same as obsolete computing environment, in a couple of years.

ACE
Alliance for Catholic Education. Established in 1994. You think that just because I get brochures about this in my mailbox, I'm gonna type stuff in? You got another think comin'.

ACE
Alliance for Clinical Education. Self-described as a ``multidisciplinary group formed in 1992 to enhance clinical instruction of medical students.''

ACE
Allied (i.e. NATO) Command Europe.

ACE
American Council on Education. Holds its annual meeting in February.

ACE
American Council on Exercise. Some of these ACE's must cross paths occasionally. This ACE, like ACSM, certifies trainers.

ACE
Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme. A naturally-occurring enzyme administered as a medication (lisinopril or enalapril) to patients with congestive heart failure (CHF). Sometimes misexpanded as ``angiotension-converting enzyme.'' Stick with the acronym if you don't know what you're talkiong about.

ACE
Antiradiation Missile Countermeasure Evaluation.

ACE
Award for Cable[casting] Excellence. Explained at the CableACE Awards entry, you'll be sorry to know.

ACEA
Association des Constructeurs Européens d'Automobiles. `European Automobile Manufacturers Association.'

ACEC
American Consulting Engineers Council. Changed its name to become the ACEC.

ACEC
American Council of Engineering Companies. Self-described as ``the only national organization devoted exclusively to the business and advocacy interests of engineering companies.'' Offices in Washington, D.C. The same organization is still often referred to as the American Consulting Engineers Council. I haven't been able to track down a press release or announcement of the name change, but on the basis of newspaper citations, the Consulting-Engineers name has been in use since at least the 1970's, and the Engineering-Companies name was first used not much earlier than June 2001.

ACEC
Associazione Cattolica Esercenti Cinema. Italian, `association of [Roman] Catholic film practitioners.' In June they hold a ceremony bestowing leone d'oro (`golden lion') awards.

ACEEE
American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

ACEHSA
Accrediting Commission on Education for Health Services Administration. The link anchored here on the expansion is hardly under construction yet (in May 2006), though the domain name has been owned by ACEHSA for many years. Try this site for some institutional history.

ACEI
I don't know what this stands for, but perhaps by a further thoughtful perusal of this document, you may be able to figure it out.

ACE Inhibitor
A drug that lowers blood pressure by inhibiting the action of ACE. Demonstrated to prevent or slow the progression of kidney disease in diabetics.

ACEIP
Association Canadienne des Étudiants et des Internes en Pharmacie. English: CAPSI.

aceite
A surprising Spanish word. All the major Romance languages have words derived from the Latin verb acere, `to taste sour.' Spanish does too (generally via French): ácido is `acid' and `sour,' acérbico is `acerbic,' acre is `acrid,' vinagre is `vinegar,' etc. (For more etymological details, see the acetic acid entry.)

The surprising thing is that aceite, which also refers to a fluid added to salad, is not related to those words. Aceite (like azeite in Portuguese) means `oil' and `olive oil.' Besides Spanish and Portuguese, most major Romance languages take their word for oil from Latin oleum. This root gave rise, mostly through French, to the English words oil and olive, and hence to olive oil (and, for that matter, the name Olive Oyl). The systematic chemical suffixes -ol and -ole arose from the fact that, before there was any clear understanding of microscopic chemical structure, virtually any fluid other than water was liable to be called an ``oil.'' Old Spanish had the word olio, meaning `[olive] oil,' but it probably would have evolved into a near homophone of ojo (`eye') in Modern Spanish. Spanish got aceite from the Arabic word zaite. (The initial a- presumably represents the Arabic definite article al.) Spanish also has the words oliva and olivo for the olive (fruit of the olive tree) and the olive tree, respectively. For the fruit, however, the word aceituna is much more common than oliva, while for the tree, olivo is the standard word.

ACEI-WNY
Association for Childhood Education International of Western New York.

acepción
This is a key word in Spanish, exactly the sort of exception that proves a rule. The word can be translated `sense,' but the only thing that an acepción is ever the sense of is a word, and it is more precisely translated as `distinct meaning.' In writing this glossary I often write sense and wish I could use the sharper tool of a word like acepción. I'd even be willing to get out in front and introduce an appropriately spelled version of the word into English, but it has seemed too late, or too early: an old word acception (q.v.) already exists with a closely similar but crucially different meaning.

The main thing that one can say about acepeciones in Spanish (as opposed to what one can say, as above, about the word acepción itself) is that typically, Spanish words have a lot of them. I have fun with this at various parts of the glossary. (See ABRA, for example.) It seems natural to me that Spanish would have a word like acepción -- it's needed. Moreover, appropriately, the word acepción has only una acepción.

acento gráfico
Accentuation is a prominent aspect of Spanish orthography. Acute accents are used primarily to indicate stress. There are simple rules that determine where the stress should normally occur if not explicitly noted (on the penultimate syllable if the word ends ina vowel or the letter n or s; on the last syllable otherwise). Hence, the accent is only marked if the stress falls elsewhere than the rule would indicate, to distinguish homonyms with stress that follows the rule, and in a very few other instances. In order to distinguish stress from the mark indicating it, the two are usually called acento gráfico and acento prosódico.

ACER
Advisory Committee on Environmental Resources.

ACerS
American CERamic Society.

ACES
Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society.

acetal plastic
Polyacetal (ACL).

acetate plastic
PolyVinylAcetate. (Abbreviated PVA or PVAc).

acetic acid
Active ingredient in vinegar. Created from alcohol by our friends, the acetobacter bacteria. For most of human history, vinegar was the strongest acid known.

The term ``acetic acid'' is about as etymologically redundant as it sounds. The Latin verb acere, `to taste sour,' yielded the word acetum, `vinegar.' It also yielded an adjective acidus > French acide, meaning `sour.' The word vinegar itself comes from the Old French vyn egre, from the Latin vinum, `wine,' and acrem, accusative of acer, `sharp.' (Never mind those final ems. They were already being elided in Late Latin. Obviously, the same colection of acer words yielded the English words acerbic and acrid. The Old French egre or aigre yielded the English eager, now applied to persons, with a somewhat different sense than the original French word. The word keen is not quite capacious enough to cover the earlier and current senses of eager, when applied to living beings, but the way a knife can have a keen edge suggests the connection between sharpness and the current meaning of eager.)

All three major Scrabble dictionaries accept acetum and its nominative plural aceta. The OSPD4 explains that it means `vinegar.' Sure -- in Latin. Even the OED doesn't list acetum as an English word. Look, as long as we're going down this road, can't I use the genitive singular aceti?

acetyl
The radical CH3CO derived from acetic acid by the removal of its hydroxyl group (cf. acyl):
                      H C
                       3 \
                          \
                           C == O
                          /
                         /

acetylsalicylic acid
2-acetyloxybenzoic acid. Aspirin.

ACF
Access Control Field. (DQDB acronym.)

ACF
Access Coordination Function.

ACF
Administration for Children and Families. A component of the US DHHS.

ACF
Advanced Communication Function. IBM acronym meaning: ``Yes! Your hopelessly old-fashioned host-centric legacy system can learn new tricks! Keep it, and soon you'll have to be buying year-2000 solutions from us too!''

ACF/NCP
Advanced Communication Function/ Network Control Program (NCP)
ACF/TCAM
Advanced Communication Function/ TeleCommunications Access Method
ACF/VTAM
Advanced Communication Function/ Virtual Terminal Access Method (VTAM)

ACF
American Culinary Federation.

ACF
AutoCorrelation Function.

ACFAS
L'Association canadienne-française pour l'avancement des sciences. (`French Canadian Association for the Advancement of Science.')

ACFP
Association of Christian Fighter Pilots.

There was a Wrangler Jeans commercial on TV during 2001 that sounded a patriotic theme. Music accompanied the words ``Some folks are born, made to wave the flag / Ooooh -- they're red, white, and blue.'' Those are the opening lines of ``Fortunate Son,'' a Vietnam-era protest song by CCR. The song continues ``And when the band plays `Hail To The Chief,' / Ooooh, they point the cannon at you.'' It's not the celebratory patriotic song that it starts out sounding like. Perhaps ACFP might have considered using a carefully edited version of ``Sky Pilot'' in the same, uh, spirit: ``You're soldiers of god, you must understand / The fate of your country is in your young hands.'' As it happens, ACFP has its own theme song -- ``Brothers In Arms.''

I love this stuff, because Jesus is Love. Incidentally, the last line of ``Sky Pilot'' goes ``Remember the words `thou shalt not kill'.'' This is not a precise translation. Both of the Hebrew versions (at Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17) use a word that should be (and elsewhere in the Bible usually is) translated `murder.' The wording of the KJV repeats that of the Coverdale Bishops' Bible of 1535. Coverdale didn't know Hebrew, so this is probably an English translation of Luther's German translation (which at both places uses töten, `kill') or borrowed from one of Coverdale's friends, such as Tyndale. In any case, the prescription of capital punishments elsewhere in the Bible makes clear that not all killing is proscribed.

The words kill and murder had pretty much the same semantic range in Elizabethan English (``Early Modern English'') as they do today. Besides fealty to the original, however, another goal of the KJV creators was to preserve English that had become familiar. (The same motive probably explains why kill has continued to be used in some of the repackagings of the KJV -- like the ASV -- that have been marketed as new ``translations.'') Certainly, they understood the plain meaning of the original text, and might have changed the wording if it had occurred to them that anyone might be confused. At the time, however, a Christian would no more have supposed the commandment to forbid any killing of humans than to forbid killing of any animals. It was a question of how much of what might be implicit needed to be in the translation. I doubt that anyone before the twentieth century seriously suggested that the commandment was meant to forbid all killing of humans. That interpretation is only possible for those who are thoroughly ignorant of the Bible.

ACG
Association for Corporate Growth. You figure it's yet another consulting outfit, but it turns out to be a nonprofit.

ACGA
American Corn Growers Association. ``The American Corn Growers Association is America's leading progressive commodity association, representing the interests of thousands of corn producers in 28 states. Since it's [ah -- I knew there was an apostrophe mark around here somewhere!] inception in 1987, the ACGA has worked tirelessly to protect farm income and rural communities. The ACGA recognizes that farmers need to have the opportunity to be rewarded for their time, investment and risk.''

ACGA
Association for Clay and Glass Artists of California. Not abbreviated ACGAC. The closer you look, the smaller it looks. It's really a mostly a San Francisco Bay Area group. Perhaps they have territorial ambitions, in the grand tradition of the ``Continental Army'' of the united states of the mid-Atlantic seaboard of North America.

ACGE
Accreditation Council for Gynecologic Endoscopy, Inc.

ACGIH
American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, Inc. No, not ``Government and.'' Originally, the organization was for government personnel involved in industrial hygiene. Now membership is open to ``all practitioners in industrial hygiene, occupational health, environmental health, or safety.'' It was originally called the NCGIH (National ...). The name was changed in 1946. I guess they only change their name when necessary. Cf. AIHA.

ACGME
Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

ACGP
American College of General Practitioners in Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery. Old name of ACOFP, q.v.

ACGQ
Association des Chirurgiens Généraux du Québec. French: `Québec Association of General Surgeons.'

Ach, ACh
AcetylCHoline. Important neurotransmitter.

ACH
AdrenoCortical Hormone.

Ach!
German interjection meaning `ah' or `aw.'

A few centuries ago the pronunciation of Ach could have been rendered agh in English, but agh! now means something more like aieeee or ack.

In real life, precision is often impossible in principle.

ACH
Air Changes per Hour. A measure of ventilation. If a pollutant (or perfume, for that matter) enters the interior environment at some rate R per hour, and the ACH is n, then the interior environment continually harbors an amount R/n of whatever-it-is.

(Strictly speaking, the R/n statement above is true only under the assumption of strong mixing. That is, it is assumed that the pollutant or whatever is uniformly diffused in the interior environment, so air exhausted contains a concentration equal to the average concentration in the interior.)

ACH
Association for Computers and the Humanities. An international professional organization for people working in computer-aided research in literature and language studies, history, philosophy, and other humanities disciplines, and especially research involving the manipulation and analysis of textual materials.

In 1998 ACH had a joint conference in Hungary with ALLC. In 2001 they have one at New York University with ALLC. This is part of a pattern described at the ALLC entry.

ACH
Automated ClearingHouse. A network that provides electronic funds transfer services.

ACHA
American College of Hospital Administrators. Now known by the superior acronym ACHE.

In Spanish, there is no word spelled acha, but hacha, q.v., has the same pronunciation.

ACHE
AcetylCHolineEsterase.

ACHE
American College of Healthcare Executives. Oh, Bravo! Bravo! Very clever. An acronym so good it hurts.

What I want to know is whether this rhymes with FACHE® (Fellow of the ACHE). An ACHE Diplomate is a Certified Healthcare Executive, or CHE®.

ACHE was earlier known as the American College of Hospital Administrators.

ACHR
Advanced Course in Hardware Retailing. ``Knowledgeable employees increase sales!''

What a plausible concept! For details, simply become an NRHA member.

ACI
After Clean Inspection.

ACI
American Concrete Institute.

ACIA
L'Agence canadienne d'inspection des aliments. As you realize if you read French, that means `agency for the ailments of the Canadian woman inspector Des.' Des is obviously the French form of the English woman's name Desiree. ACIA in English is CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency).

ACIA
Asynchronous Communications Interface Adapter. A UART. An example is the 6850 communications chip used by the MC68000.

ACIA
Automated Calibration Internal Analysis System.

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ACICS
Augusta County Institute for Classical Studies. ``[B]ased in Virginia's beautiful Shenandoah Valley,'' it is ``a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to advancing the knowledge of the ancient Greco-Roman world on the elementary school level.''

``The centerpiece of the Institute is its student program, known as LatinSummer. LatinSummer, a summer enrichment program for students in grades three to five, is a joint project of ACICS and Augusta County Public Schools. It is one of the largest of the County's many summer programs. Each year, LatinSummer accepts approximately 100 students from the Augusta County public school system. These students then take part in two weeks of exciting, hands-on classes covering topics such as Mythology, Roman Culture, Classical Latin, and Conversational Latin. The students also participate in an activity period each day, which allows them to delve deeper into Classics through hands-on and critical thinking activities.''

ACID
AirCraft IDentification.

acid
A proton donor or, in the Lewis definition, an electron pair acceptor. Details of the etymology at the acetic acid entry.

In general, acids taste sour. Indeed, European languages typically use the same word for the chemical and gustatory properties. One can translate the first sentence of this paragraph into Spanish as: En general, los ácidos tienen gusto ácido. It detracts a bit from the impressiveness of the insight. Ditto German: Im allgemein, die Säuren schmecken sauer.

But getting back to the point (and ``sharp'' taste is often sourness), the sour taste sense detects chemical acidity, but there is no equivalent taste sense for basicity. Just so you can calibrate your mouth, the pH of lemons is around 2.2, and vinegar is around 2.9. Acid taste is not a perfect measure of acidity, however. For example, apples and grapefruit have comparable acidity (3 to 3.3). An important factor in determining sour taste is sugar: sweetness masks acidity.

ACIDS
American College of Integrated Delivery Systems. Be careful you don't spill that.

ACIL
American Council of Independent Laboratories. That's what it formerly stood for. They've moved beyond their expansion, and that is now in the category of etymology. I hate that. Most other people don't accept it too well either; they want an organization's name to tell them something about it. Of course, they also don't want an organization's name to change. The only solution if you have a meaningful name is to never change what you do (spin off subsidiaries, if necessary). Another alternative is to use a meaningless name in the first place.

ACILS
American Center for International Labor Solidarity. See IRI for the low-down.

ACIP
Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

ACIPR
Adjacent Channel Interface Power Ratio.

ACIS
American Conference for I-wish Studies. Oops, sorry -- Fudd on the brain again. That's Irish Studies. Or, as most natives would hardly know how to say, An Chomhdháil Mheiriceánach do Léann na hÉireann. It's
``a multidisciplinary scholarly organization with approximately 1500 members in the United States, Ireland, Canada and other countries around the world.

Each spring the ACIS holds a national conference attended by 300-400 people from the academic community and the general public. Each fall, meetings are held in the New England, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and Western regions; the Southern regional takes place in the winter. [You know, these guys have something on the ball!] The ACIS also sponsors joint sessions with the American Historical Association [What? The Irish have something to do with US history?] and the Modern Language Association at their annual conventions. Both national and regional meetings include plenary speakers, academic sessions in all fields of Irish Studies, poetry and fiction readings, films and performances of Irish music or plays. In recent years the ACIS has met in Boston, Madison, Omaha, and Philadelphia, as well as Dublin, Galway, Belfast and Limerick. ...''

Active little group, aren't they!

``The ACIS was founded in 1960 as the American Committee for Irish Studies [an interesting coincidence]; it is incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia as a non-profit organization.''

I'm not sure if ACIS is a singular ``conference'' because it originally had only one (almost) annual meeting (the 38th, in Limerick, was not until 2000) or if it's singular in the same way that the United Synagogue (see USCJ) or the Roman Catholic Church is singular.

ACJ
Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes. Spanish, `Christian Association of Youths.' Effectively: YMCA.

ack
Interjection expressing distress.

ack, ACK
ACKnowledge. ASCII 06, (CTRL-F), Acknowledgments.

A mass-ack is a mass acknowledgment, typically a newsgroup posting in acknowledgment of the receipt of many emails or email votes.

ack-ack
Slang expansion of Anti-Aircraft fire or Antiaircraft Arms (AA). I thought it was an onomatopoeia for sound made by some machine guns, but the dictionary agrees with Mark. As a sop, it concedes that the usage was influenced by ``attack,'' so there's a sense in which the term is imitative.

The Philosophical Lexicon edited by Daniel Dennett offers an uncannily similar meaning in philosophical discourse, based on a completely unrelated etymology (Ackerman eponym).

Ack-Ack
The title of a memoir by General Sir Frederick Pile, G.C.B., D.S.O., M.C., G.O.C.-in-C., Anti-Aircraft Command 1939-45. The book is mostly about ``Britain's defence against air attack during the second world war.''

I read so few books that in order to appear literate, I make a point of discussing extensively in this glossary every book I do read. This one is mentioned at the command entry.

Acknowledgments
Published works often contain a formal expression of the thanks due to people or institutions who have helped make the publication possible.

In articles for technical journals and conference proceedings, a separate paragraph or two is typical, tucked between the end of the text and the beginning of the list of references, with the section heading ``Acknowledgments.'' This is the place to mention people who participated in ``useful discussions'' but who didn't make the cut as coauthors. It is also a good place to thank any private or public agency that funded or facilitated the research. A 1997 conference paper by John K. Yoh has two-and-a-half pages of acknowledgments, ending with ``[and thanks] ... especially to our funding agencies (ERDA, NSF) and the American taxpayers.'' Awwww... he remembered! [The quoted paper is ``The Discovery of the b Quark at Fermilab in 1977: The Experiment Coordinator's Story,'' presented at some conference at Fermilab in 1997. (January or March, apparently.)]

Serious nonfiction books normally have acknowledgments in the front matter (see also forward), either as part of a preface or as a separate section. (Acknowledgments in some form are actually required, but since jerks and geniuses are exempted, we're off the hook.)

It is not uncommon for the end of a book's acknowledgments to be a sort of ``dis-disclaimer'' (awkward neologism, sorry) or ``reclaimer'' (hackneyed joke, sorry) in which the author accepts responsibility for all errors, despite the involvement of others who might have prevented them. Here's an unusual version of this, in Orrin W. Robinson's Old English and its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages (Stanford University Press, 1992). Its Preface (pp. v-vi) ends thus:

      It hardly needs to be said that I would like to blame the above people for any defects remaining in the book. Unfortunately, I can't. O.W.R.

A somber note also occurs at the end of ``Stuperspace,'' the last article in a special proceedings issue of Physica 15D, pp. 289-293 (1985):

We would like to thank A. Einstein; unfortunately, he's dead.

The preceding examples probably expressed greater regret than was felt. That's better than the alternative situation. Here's how Simon Varey begins the Acknowledgments page of his Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought 7):

In New York City on 1 May 1984, a thief took every one of my notes for an earlier incarnation of this book. I refer him to Tristram Shandy, book 3, chapter 11. Because of him I have written a different book, and probably a better one, but I wish I had not been forced to do so much of the research twice.

(The entire cited chapter is given over to the reading of an extremely thorough and ecumenical anathema.)

Let's have another writer's nightmare: Ernest Hemingway's first wife Hadley once put all his typescripts together with all the carbons in one suitcase. She forgot the suitcase on a train platform; it was stolen and never recovered.

``Acknowledgements'' is a variant spelling. I want to thank other reference sources for setting me straight on this. See also dedications and NORAD.

I just happened to find my copy of a (probably the) biography of Robert L. Vann, and noticed that the scratched-over handwriting inside the front cover is a vague dedication by the author. (``In appreciation for what I am attempting to do. Thanks, Andrew Buni. September 20, 1974.'') I suppose it's possible that this was written at a signing, but the text and the presence of a date suggest otherwise. Also, back in those days university presses didn't engage in much, if any, of that sort of promotion. I figure Buni sent this as a complimentary copy, possibly as a promotion.

Taking Buni's presumed gesture as an acknowledgment of moral support, at least, we might describe it as an intermediate level of acknowledgment: the person to whom the dedication was inscribed is not explicitly acknowledged in the front matter. This raises the question whether persons acknowledged get a complimentary copy. I received one book this way, and I'm not aware of any other book in which I have been acknowledged. With very long acknowledgment lists, however, and with certain kinds of corporate entities, I imagine complimentary copies are rare. It's probably up to the author, and publishers probably balk at too many complimentary copies unless they can be justified as realistically promoting sales.

With textbooks, however, things get a bit twisted. Since professors can ``require'' a book for courses they teach, textbook publishers consider the ``examination copies'' sent free to them a sensible expense. The word ``required'' is enclosed in quotes because many students don't buy the texts their professors think they require. University book stores place orders for fewer books than professors ``order'' from them, partly anticipating this and partly to account for competition from off-campus book sources and from nominally inappropriate older editions. Problems occur whenever (and that's often) book stores guess wrong as to the number of books that will really be required. Students may want to keep this in mind, and not wait too long to buy books for smaller courses. It is my impression that this is a particular problem for engineering courses, but that might be biased by my limited experience. I hope you read this paragraph carefully. Pretty soon it will be removed to ``examination copy'' or ``university book stores'' or some other entry, and you'll have a hell of a time finding it again.

Other academic publication quirks have to do with doctoral and master's dissertations. These are bound, but hardly published. (Their content does often see publication, however. In science and engineering, the dissertation is often cobbled from short papers the student authored or co-authored for journal publication. In the humanities, a recent graduate's doctoral dissertation typically forms the core of a book that a newly-minted tenure-track professor hopes will lead to tenure. For the extremely unusual instance of a dissertation eventually published over 40 years later, see the case of Frank Bourgin at the ABD entry.) In any event, dissertations are now mostly available in cheap photocopies that University Microfilms will produce from its archives. Most of them have acknowledgment front matter, and the degree candidate -- if not too stupid to earn a degree -- first acknowledges his academic advisor (or occasionally advisors), and then others. The university library always, the department if required, the advisor or advisors certainly, and the other members of the committee often get a bound copy of the final version of the dissertation. (The library may require two.)

ACL
Access Control List. Used in NTFS for Windows NT.

ACL
ACetal. Polyoxymethylene. Also abbreviated POM. San Diego Plastics, Inc. has a short page of information on Acetal.

ACL
Advanced CMOS Logic. One-micron technology. Also AC. Cf. ACT. This page from TI.

[column]

ACL
American Classical League. Founded in 1919 for the purpose of fostering the study of classical languages in the United States and Canada. An organization mostly for secondary-school Latin and Greek teachers, but membership is open to anyone who (and only to anyone who) would want to join (``committed to the preservation and advancement of our classical inheritance from Greece and Rome'').

Based in Oxford! Oh. I mean ``Oxford, OH.'' So is the Campanian Society, come to think of it.

ACL
Anterior Cruciate Ligament.

ACL
Association for Computational Linguistics.

ACLA
American Comparative Literature Association, founded in 1960. A constituent society of the ACLS since 1974. ACLS has an overview.

ACLAM
American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine. In ninth-grade biology, one of our first labs involved shelling a clam.

ACLANT
Allied (i.e. NATO) Command atLANTic.

[column]

AClas
Acta CLASsica. Annual, begun in 1959. Published by A. A. Balkema Publishers. ISSN 0065-1141. Indexed on PCI (not free) and TOCS-IN (free). (Choose.)

ACLJ
American Center for Law and Justice.

In 1990, it ``began its operations in Virginia Beach, Virginia -- where the ACLJ was founded by Dr. Pat Robertson, a Yale Law School graduate [better known, I believe, as a Christian broadcaster]. Over the years, the ACLJ has expanded its work and reach with the creation of the European Centre for Law and Justice, based in Strasbourg, France and the Slavic Centre for Law and Justice, based in Moscow, Russia. Today, the ACLJ has a network of attorneys nationwide and its national headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. -- just steps away from the Supreme Court and Congress.''

ACLPS
Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists. (This organization apparently still hasn't bought its own domain, so the current URL is probably more impermanent than most.)

ACLS
Advanced Cardiac Life Support. A regime including defibrillator and drugs.

ACLS
American Council of Learned Societies.

Thirty-four out of its sixty-one constituent societies have names beginning in the letter A.

ACLU
American Civil Liberties Union. Nat Hentoff, a disenchanted former activist member, says a friend of his now calls them the ``religious left.''

Acm
ACetamidoMethyl.

ACM
Academy of Country Music. A trade association based in Los Angeles.

`` 'cademy'' -- that sounds kinda pointy-headed. Shore would be nass if'n they got togethah witha computin' machin'ry folk fer a joint hoot'n'anny!

In ``The Blues Brothers,'' Elwood (Dan Ackroyd) asks ``What kind of music do you usually have here?'' He receives this immortal reply:

Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western.

Y'know, this is just the sort of attitude that could explain how there has to be a CMA as well. (Interestingly, even though SBF has a full-time banjo expert at the alpha chapter [Buffalo], we only learned about ACM and CMA through a videotaping mishap at our Ontario research facility.)

ACM
Address Complete Message. (ATM, SS7 acronym.)

ACM
Alan Crider Ministries.

ACM
Alliance for Community Media.

ACM
Asbestos-Containing Material. A quick way to make bankruptcy look attractive.

ACM
Association for Computing Machinery. It would be pretty odd if this organization didn't have a homepage.

Whatis?com offers a handy list of their special interest groups (SIG's).

ACM
Atmospheric Corrosion-rate Monitor[s].

ACM
Audio Compression Manager.

ACMI
American College of Medical Informatics.

ACMLA
Association of Canadian Map Libraries & Archives. It's interesting to compare this with the French name (the expansion of ACACC).

ACMP
American College of Medical Physics. Not an undergraduate-type college, you understand. Publishes the Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics (JACMP). Cf. AAPM.

ACMPE
American College of Medical Practice Executives. Closely affiliated with the MGMA. The ACMPE administers examinations (and requires continuing education credit hours) to certify MPE's (as CMPE's). Publication of one sort or another is required to advance to fellow status (FACMPE).

ACMRS
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. At ASU.

ACMS
Aircraft Condition Monitoring System.

ACMV
L'Association canadienne des médecins vétérinaires. (In English: CVMA.)

ACN
AcetoNitrile. CH3CN. A/k/a methyl cyanide, cyanomethane (37k and 5.6k ghits respectively, as of mid-May 2009, compared to 2.35M ghits for acetonitrile). The systematic name, the name deemed correct by IUPAC, is ethanenitrile (8.4k ghits).

Acetonitrile is a byproduct of acrylonitrile production. Acrylonitrile is also abbreviated ACN.

ACN
ACryloNitrile. CH2CHCN. See previous entry.

ACN
Anglican Communion Network. An incipient secessionist movement still (2005) within the ECUSA. Alternatively, it is a part of the ECUSA that wants to remain within the worldwide Anglican Communion as the ECUSA departs. ``ACN allows Episcopalians to remain in communion with the vast majority of the worldwide Anglican Communion who have declared either impaired or broken communion with the Episcopal Church USA. For many Episcopalians, the ACN has come to represent the hope for a return to the historic faith and order of Anglicanism.'' From the outside, it seems to be all about gay clergy, but they insist it's about other, little stuff, like belief in God and scripture. Cf. AAC.

ACN
Automated Collision Notification (system).

ACO
L'Association canadiennedes optométristes. In English: CAO.

ACO
Automatic Cut-Off.

ACOA
Adult Child[ren] Of Alcoholic[s].

AcOEt
Ethyl (Et) Acetate (Ac). The ester formed from ethanol (CH3CH2OH) and acetic acid (CH3COOH). The O in the abbreviation presumably represents the oxygen between the carboxyl and alcohol carbons.

ACOFP
American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians. ``ACOFP is the national organization of Osteopathic Family Physicians. ... Officially chartered April 4, 1950, in the State of California, the College was affiliated with the AOA in 1953 as the American College of General Practitioners in Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery.''

Acol
Since this is an acronym glossary, the only thing we're allowed to say about the Acol bidding system in bridge is that Acol is not an acronym. Oh, all right.

The following is from a newsgroup posting by Martin Ambuhl:

The Acol system evolved from discussions by Jack Marx and S.J. Simon at the Acol Bridge Club in Acol Road in Hampstead. These were fueled by the 1933 Culbertson's America vs. England match. Marx and Simon formed the first Acol Team with Harrison Gray and Iain Macleod in 1935. They completely dominated the previously preeminent teams (Ingram, Beasley, and Lederer), winning everything in sight. The Acol team, augmented by Leslie Dobbs and Kenneth Konstam, won the 1936 Gold Cup. Shortly thereafter Terence Reese joined the Acol group. By the time the Germans invaded Poland, half the tournament players in England had adopted the new methods, including such players as Boris Shapiro, Niel Furse, Nico Gardner (head of the London School of Bridge).

There is an Acol Bridge Club in that part of London today, specifically at 86 West End Lane, West Hampstead, London NW6 2LX. That's at the corner of West End Lane and Compayne Gardens. From there along West End Lane it's about 3 blocks south (counting streetcorners on the left) to Acol Road. Some newsgroup postings claim it's the same club and some claim it isn't. There ought to be some reason why this bridge club is named for a short, somewhat distant side-street. Moreover, as of 2005, the club's homepage has a marquee that scrolls ``The Home of English Bridge for over 60 years!'' It's plausible that the page author wanted a round number, and that ``over 70 years'' wasn't yet appropriate when the page went up. OTOH, FWIW, the club's pages seem nowhere to come out and make the plain assertion that the Acol system was named after the club and not, say, vice versa.

Today Acol in various variants (including one called Stone Age Acol, presumably the closest to what was played in the 1930's) is the dominant bidding system in Britain.

Here's a manageable set of webpages on Acol, served by Bridge Guys (dot com).

ACOL
Analytical Chemistry by Open Learning. A textbook series published by Wiley.

ACOR
American Center of Oriental Research. In Amman, Jordan.

ACOR
Association of Cancer Online Resources.

ACOR
Australian Centre for Oilseed Research.

ACORN
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ``Now'' is a moving target. The organization has been in existence since 1970. It promotes left-wing and progressive causes in the US. In 2003, ACORN had 160,000 dues-paying members. Roughly one activist for every two thousand inactivists. Apparently that's not enough. They hire people for $8 an hour or thereabouts, to go into the community, find eligible citizens, and help them fill out voter-registration cards. The way this promotes left-wing causes is that the communities are poor and presumed to be left-leaning.

A wage of $8 an hour may not buy very good work, and many of the ex-cons they managed to hire didn't follow proper procedure. They helped non-existent and therefore ineligible citizens, named them fancifully or with help from newspapers and TV, and helped these fictitious persons fill out voter-registration cards by, for example, listing their addresses as homeless shelters. They must have been surprised when they were found out, but persons named Tom Tancredo, Dennis Hastert, and Leon Spinks turned out not to be as obscure as they must have supposed, and names like Fruito Boy Crispila not so credible. Just to put some numbers on this: in 2006, ACORN registered 1800 new voters in the state of Washington, and all but 6 of them were fake. According to Fox News, state investigators were told by one worker ``[that] it was a lot of hard work making up all those names'' and another ``said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms.'' I guess that could explain Mr. Fruito Crispila.

ACOST
Advisory Council On Science and Technology (UK). I don't know...pronouncability is not always a virtue. I can think of two alternate ways to apprehend the acronym per se that make this appear an infelicitous choice. Maybe they should have kept it ``Advisory Council of the United Kingdom Government on S&T issues.''

ACP
African, Caribbean and Pacific. A heterogeneous but apparently useful category for economic-development types. It doesn't include any large country with possessions in or borders on one or more of these regions.

Hey, why not? Here's proof that I didn't make this one up myself. If I had made it up, it would have been more specific, like Angola, Cuba, and Portugal or Purgatory (somewhere in the southern Hemisphere or New Mexico). [Let me clarify that: there's a town of Purgatory in New Mexico. For all I know, it might be a center for laxative production. Also, according to Dante's Divine Comedy, Purgatory is at the antipode from, uh, I think it's Jerusalem.]

In EC usage: a set of developing countries signatory to the Lomé convention (1975), a reciprocal trade-and-aid agreement.

ACP
American Center for Physics. ``A building that houses central offices for the American Institute of Physics, The American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.''

ACP
American College of Phlebology. Man, they're putting American schools in all kinds of way-out places.

ACP
American College of Physicians.

ACP
American College of Psychiatrists.

ACP
Animal Care Panel. Founded in 1950, renamed AALAS in 1967.

ACP
Associated Collegiate Press.

The Observer is ``The Independent Student Newspaper Serving Notre Dame and Saint Mary's.'' The issue of Monday, February 25, 2001 had the following front-page story, modestly placed below the fold:

Observer takes top honors at ACP national convention.

The article was written by one of the senior news editors. Here are the first two paragraphs, faithfully transcribed:
The Observer took home its first ever Newspaper of the Year award Sunday from the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP).

``This was the result of many long hours in the office four our staff and is proof that The Observer is continuing it's long legacy of excellence,'' said Noreen Gillespie, managing editor of The Observer.

The story continues on page 4. Half of the World & Nation page (p. 5) is devoted to an AP wire report from London: Foot-and-mouth cases on the rise.

If you didn't read the rest of the paper, you might imagine that the elementary spelling errors and international news sense were jokes, like the full-issue salute to Saint Mary's women that once ran on Labor Day (1996, I think it was).

The Observer won in the ``Four-year [college] Daily [more than once per week]'' category. In addition to first- through third-place winners, there were two honorable mentions (HM's). That sounds like a higher honor.

If you believe what you read in the paper, then here's some further information on the ACP: it ``is a division of the National Scholastic Press Association [NSPA] and is the oldest and largest organization for college student media in the United States. Founded in 1921, the ACP today has nearly 800 members, including close to 600 student newspapers.'' As the ACP page explains, it was the NSPA that was founded in 1921, with some college members; the ACP was founded in 1933.

ACP, l'ACP
L'Association canadienne de philosophie. (Canadian Philosophical Association.)

ACP, l'ACP
L'Association canadienne des paraplégiques. (Canadian Paraplegic Association.)

ACP
Automóvel Clube de Portugal.

ACP
Autoridad del Canal de Panamá. `Panama Canal Authority.' An autonomous agency of the Panamanian government, charged with operating and maintaining the Panama Canal.

ACPA
American Chronic Pain Association.

ACPA
American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association.

ACPA
American College Personnel Association.

ACPA
American Concrete Pipe Association.

ACPA
American Crop Protection Association. Brought to you by farmers, the people who own the 5AM TV timeslot.

ACPAR
Angular Correlation of Positron Annihilation Radiation. Calm down -- all it takes to annihilate a positron is an electron, and you contain about a mole of them per gram (or about 2.73x1026 per pound).

ACPAU
Association canadienne du personnel administratif universitaire. In English: CAUBO.

ACPE
Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education. Formerly the ACPE.

Originally founded (1932) to accredit pre-service education, in 1975 its scope expanded to include accrediting providers of continuing pharmacy education. That's the general direction, isn't it? Professionalization up the wazoo. But the cure probably isn't worse than the disease. In continuing legal education, a lot of the commercially-offered credits are regarded as worthless.

ACPE
American College of Physician Executives.

ACPE
American Council on Pharmaceutical Education. Now the ACPE. The name change took place in 2003, so there's a lot of confusion, with many webpages referring to the ACPE when they mean the ACPE. Some pages mentioin both the ACPE and the ACPE, without giving any indication that they are the same organization. For more about the name change, see the this AJP entry.

ACPI
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface.
``An open industry specification co-developed by Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix, and Toshiba.

ACPI establishes industry-standard interfaces for OS-directed configuration and power management on laptops, desktops, and servers.

ACPI evolves the existing collection of power management BIOS code, Advanced Power Management (APM) application programming interfaces (APIs), PNPBIOS APIs, Multiprocessor Specification (MPS) tables and so on into a well-defined power management and configuration interface specification.

The specification enables new power management technology to evolve independently in operating systems and hardware while ensuring that they continue to work together.''

Of practical consumer interest:

OSPM provides a new appliance interface to consumers. In particular, it provides for a sleep button that is a ``soft'' button that does not turn the machine physically off but signals the OS to put the machine in a soft off or sleeping state. ACPI defines two types of these ``soft'' buttons: one for putting the machine to sleep and one for putting the machine in soft off.

This gives the OEM two different ways to implement machines: A one-button model or a two-button model. The one-button model has a single button that can be used as a power button or a sleep button as determined by user settings. The two-button model has an easily accessible sleep button and a separate power button. In either model, an override feature that forces the machine off or resets it without OS consent is also needed to deal with various [putatively] rare, but problematic, situations.
(See section 1.5 of the ACPI spec.)

ACPM
American College of Prehospital Medicine. A college in the sense of a degree-granting institution, with a physical location but with courses generally taken on-line. ``If you have been frustrated trying to complete an undergraduate degree and feel you may never be able to do so trying to balance family and career, Internet-based distance education may be the answer. ACPM is 100% dedicated to the needs of military and civilian emergency medical care providers.'' This is the first college I've ever encountered that features PayPal as its principal payment option. Accredited since 1995 by DETC.

ACPM
American College of Preventive Medicine. This ACPM is intended to delay your need for the services of those trained by this ACPM.

ACPO
(UK) Association of Chief Police Officers.

ACPP
Australian College of Pharmacy Practice.

ACPPU
l'Association canadienne des professeures et professeurs d'université. Same as the CAUT.

ACPR
Ariel Center for Policy Research. It was ``established in 1997 as a non-profit, non-partisan organization, committed to stimulating and informing the national and international debates concerning all aspects of security policy - notably those policies which are an outcome of the political process started in Oslo and subsequently called the Peace Process.'' Likud-oriented.

ACPRTS
Association canadienne des professeurs de rédaction technique et scientifique. (`Canadian Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.')

ACPV
American College of Poultry Veterinarians. Chickens, and apparently birds in general, have their lungs near the tops of their bodies. I guess that improves stability, even on the ground.

ACPW
Asymmetrical CoPlanar Waveguide.

acq.
ACQui{ re[s|d] | sition[s] }.

ACQS
American Council for Québec Studies. Apparently based, like ACSUS, at SUNY Plattsburgh, in upstate New York.

ACR
Abrupt Change in Resistivity. Resulting, say from, electromigration-induced void formation.

ACR
Additive Cell Rate. The rate at which a source can transmit (ATM) cells after increasing its rate by the RIF.

ACR
Adjusted Community Rating.

ACR
American College of Radiology. Not post-secondary educational institution, but, well, yes, a post-post-secondary or post-post-post-secondary educational institution, and as such a post-secondary one, but not exactly that, but a professional organization for professionals -- not that undergraduates aren't in some sense professional but anyway you get the idea.

ACR
American College of Rheumatology. ``[T]he professional organization of rheumatologists and associated health professionals who share a dedication to healing, preventing disability, and curing the more than 100 types of arthritis and related disabling and sometimes fatal disorders of the joints, muscles, and bones.'' ``Curing'' is perhaps a bit hopeful; mostly, it's about palliation and pain management.

ACR, L'ACR
L'Association canadienne des radiodiffuseurs. ``Le porte-parole des radiotélédiffuseurs privés du Canada.'' (`The voice of the private broadcasters of Canada.') English CAB.

CAB holds its annual convention in October.

ACR
L'Association canadienne des rédacteurs-réviseurs. Editors' Association of Canada.

acre
A nice, sensible unit of area: 43560 square feet. Many countries that have wholeheartedly adopted ``international'' (SI) units find that it is still somewhat more convenient to measure area in old units, because real estate, as such, doesn't wear out very quickly.

An acre is one 640th of a square mile, or 0.40468564224 ha.

ACRE
Active Citizens for Responsible Environmentalism.

ACRES
Australian Centre for Remote Sensing. ``Australia's principal earth resource satellite ground station and data processing facility. ACRES is one in a network of ground stations covering most of the world.'' WWWVL includes a page of remote sensing organizations.

ACRID
The Alberta Chapter of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, Inc. ACRID is affiliated with the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID), based in the US, and with the Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada (AVLIC). All I really want to know is whether they pronounce it ``ay-see-rid'' or ``acrid,'' but for some reason these organizations seem to be less than usually interested in the way words sound.

ACRL
Association of College and Research Libraries. A division of the American Library Association (ALA).

ACRONYM
A Contrived Reduction Of Nouns, Yielding Mnemonics.

See also notarikon.

across this great land
among those eligible to vote for me in the next election

ACROV
American Civic Religion, Official Version. Term introduced by Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his 1996 book on Thos. Jefferson.

ACRS
Accelerated Cost Recovery System. A term used by the US IRS. If you need help preparing your tax return, try visiting the IRS website.

Acrux
Jargon for Alpha Crucis, the star at the ``foot'' of the Southern Cross.

ACRV
Assured Crew Return Vehicle or Astronaut Crew Rescue Vehicle. Because getting there really is only half the fun.

acrylic acid
Propenoic acid. Illustration at the PMMA entry. Here's a gas: acrylic acid has antibiotic action. You can read about it in J. M. Sieburth, ``Acrylic acid, an antibiotic principle in antarctic waters,'' Science, 132, 6767 (1960). And no, it didn't come from a toxic shirt spill, it came from yellow-brown algae. atohaas, a subsidiary of Rohm and Haas that bills itself as ``The Worldwide Leader in Acrylic Technology,'' does not list this among the medical and other applications of acrylics.

Here are instructions on how you can use acrylic to protect yourself.

Du Pont originally began research in acrylic plastics in order to find a use for its surplus isobutanol byproduct. Plexiglass is polyacrylic.

acrylic plastic
Almost certainly poly methyl methacrylic plastic (PMMA).

ACS
Access Control System.

ACS
Ackerman Computer Sciences. ``Designers, Developers and Manufacturers of Intelligent Electronic Components Including CEBus Products and Custom Embedded Controllers.''

ACS
Acrylonitrile Chlorinated polyethylene Styrene (terpolymer).

ACS
Acute Coronary Syndrome.

ACS
Advanced Communication System.

ACS
Advanced Conservative Studies. Something practiced at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, according to the eponymous founder.

ACS
American Cancer Society. American Cancer Society NYSERNet site.

ACS
American Ceramic Society. Also ``ACerS.'' Visit here for the Basic Science Program.

ACS
American Chemical Society.

ACS
American College of Surgeons. Founded in 1913, it currently has over 60,000 members and represents all surgical specialties.

ACS
Archives and Collections Society.

ACS
Associated Colleges of the South.

ACS
L'Association canadienne de soccer. Try L'ACS.

ACS
Association of Caribbean States. Cf. OECS.

ACS
Attitude Control System. No, not beer. The attitude here is a plane's angle of attack.

ACS
Australian Computer Society.

ACSAD
Arab Center for the Studies of Arid zones and Dry lands. It's run by the Arab League and located in Deir Ezzor, in northern Syria.

Northern Syria is also the area where reportedly, on September 6, 2007, Israeli planes attacked a facility where North Korean engineers were helping their Syrian friends with some cement they had shipped in from North Korea. Recently modified ship manifests prove that it was cement, but some people wonder why Israel attacked a cement shipment. That's all the sense I can make of the conflicting stories regarding the Korean-flagged ships.

Another version of events has it that Israel attacked military supplies for Hebollah, but that's ridiculous because (a) under the terms of the 2006 ceasefire, Hezbollah is not be rearmed, and (b) under the supervision of the UN-hatted international peace-keeping force charged with preventing Hezbollah from rearming, Hezbollah was fully rearmed long before the September attack. In short, no one believes the Hezbollah arms story.

Interestingly, the only countries that have condemned the attack are Syria and North Korea, which have also denied that the planes bombed a military research facility that was storing North Korean nuclear material, shortly after North Korea again finally agreed to abandon its nuclear enrichment program. So if North Korea is not playing a Syrian shell game with its nuclear weapons program, why did the Israelis bomb?

On September 29, Syrian Vice-President Faruq Al Shara showed photos of some damaged building somewhere and explained that the Israeli attack hit ACSAD. The next day, a statement was issued by ACSAD, attacking the Zionist media for claiming that the attack hit ACSAD. The Arab League headquarters in Cairo was unable to confirm that the photos shown by Al Shara were of ACSAD.

Well, here's something curious. In January 2006, the Directors-General of ACSAD and the Arab Atomic Energy Agency signed a memorandum of understanding. I don't know the details, but it had to do with agriculture.

ACSANZ
Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand.

ACSC
Australian Computer Science Conference.

ACSE
Antarctic Coastal and Shelf Ecosystem.

ACSE
Association Control Server Element. (In application layer of ATM.)

ACSET
(Grand Rapids, Michigan) Area Community Service Employment and Training.

ACSL
Advanced Continuous Simulation (programming) Language.

ACSM
American College of Sports Medicine. Founded 1954. See also NASM.

ACSM
American Congress on Surveying and Mapping. Founded in 1941. Member societies:

ACSO
Association des Centres de Santé de l'Ontario. French for `Association of Ontario Health Centres.'

ACSUS
AIDS Cost and Services Utilization Survey. Published in 1993, it was ``a longitudinal study of persons with HIV-related disease. In a combination of personal interviews and abstraction of medical and billing records spanning an 18-month period, information was collected on more than 1,900 HIV-infected adults and adolescents, including approximately 350 women, and on 140 HIV-infected children under 13 years of age.''

ACSUS
Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. Publishes the quarterly ARCS. So that's what they call that white region up there where the state map colorings end!

ACSW
Academy of Certified Social Workers. Other credentials are Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and Board-Certified Diplomate (BCD) in Clinical Social Work (CSW). See SW entry for related entries. (http://www.acsw.com/ is Academic Software, Inc., which prefers to go by the acronym ASI.)

ACT
Action for Children's Television. Founded by Peggy Charren and two other Boston moms in 1968.

In the 1970's, ACT successfully pushed for legal restrictions on commercialism in children's TV programming, and claimed credit for the prohibition of product promotions by children's-show hosts and other commercial practices. ACT also successfully pushed for a ban (implemented by FCC regulatory action) on vitamin-pill ads, when it was found that children were poisoning themselves with overdoses. (Iron is very dangerous; some vitamins, particularly the oil-soluble ones, can produce some of the same symptoms when taken in great excess as when not available in sufficient quantity.)

ACT's advocacy helped pass the Children's Television Act of 1990, which required the FCC to impose some limits on commercials in children's programming (in 1991 they set these at 10.5 minutes per hour weekends, 12 minutes/hour weekdays) and required commercial stations to report on efforts to provide ``educational and informational'' programming as part of their license renewal applications. Products with direct tie-ins to a children's program are forbidden to be advertised during the program (so, for example, GI Joe dolls can't be advertised during the GI Joe show), though they can be advertised at any other time, such as immediately afterwards. You're not the only person who thinks this particular restriction is toothless. There are also restrictions on 900-number ads aimed at children.

ACT president Charren did something surprising in 1992. She decided that with the FCC's new rules, there was no important work for ACT to do that could not be done better by other organizations, particularly local advocacy groups, so she folded it. Remaining assets of $125,000 were donated to Harvard University Graduate School of Education for an annual fellowship and a lecture series on children's TV. ACT was supported over the years by a series of grants -- the first for $165,000 from the John Markle Foundation in 1970, later grants from the Ford and Carnegie foundations. Some saw the end of ACT as simply a reaction to a funding fall-off. The organization had a $500,000/year budget and a staff of 15 in its 70's heyday, and was down to four employees and $125,000/year in 1991.

ACT always opposed censorship, as she saw it, and that's about right if you accept the conventional legal views that (1) commercial speech does not enjoy the full protection that the first amendment grants to noncommercial, press, and individual private speech and (2) that children have special vulnerability that the state has a significant (or ``compelling,'' Supreme Court decisions turn on such distinctions) interest to be balanced against free-speech concerns. In any case, the Federal Communications Act is the most explicitly socialist document in US law, recognizing the frequency spectrum as a limited resource belonging to the people collectively, and hence subject to regulation by the FCC. ACT opposed the boycotts and what Peggy Charren saw as censorship advocated by conservative groups like the Moral Majority, and indicated that their declining influence also allowed her to disband ACT. ACT joined on the plaintiffs' side in a suit by broadcasters against the FCC's ban on indecent broadcasts.

ACT
ACTivity bit. (ATM acronym.)

ACT
Actual Cycle Time.

ACT
Advanced CMOS logic (ACL) using TTL voltage levels.

ACT
(Canadian) Alliance for Children and Television. Sounds like a conflict of interest right there.

ACT
Alternative Control Technique[s].

ACT
America Coming Together. A liberal group founded in 2003. Heavily funded by George Soros and insurance magnate Peter Lewis, it spent tens of millions of dollars in get-out-the-vote drives in 2004. It was originally intended to continue operating as an independent political organization, with the cachet it gained from helping to elect President John F. Kerry giving it influence in the new administration, but things didn't work out that way. It was disbanded in August 2005.

There was a sister organization called the Media Fund, similarly funded and defunded by the same pair. Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel, the DCCC Chair for the 2006 elections, gave an interview to the New York Daily News in August 2006 in which he transparently criticized Soros and Lewis: ``In the 2004 election there were some very active players who, as far as I can tell, have now decided they're neither going to be involved in the field, advertising or anything. ... Do you know where they are?'' Some commentators commentated that dissing some of the party's most generous contributors might not be wise.

ACT
American College of Theriogenologists. From an About-ACT page: ``To develop a name for the College, Professor Herbert Howe, Department of Classics, University of Wisconsin was consulted. After much consideration Theriogenology was chosen; therio(=beast or animal) + gen/genesis (=beginning, birth, reproduction)+ology (=study of).''

During WWI, my grandfather was an officer in the Kaiser's army, on the western front. As an officer, he rode a horse, of course. On some occasion, with most of the details lost to history, a farmer went away and left him with a mare that was about to drop a foal. The farmer must have supposed that as an officer and a horse rider, he knew his way around a horse. Maybe my grandfather should have pointed out that in civilian life, he was a lawyer (actually a Rechtsanwalt, which is perhaps better translated as `barrister,' but in any case a city-slicker lacking the relevant hands-on experience). In the event, the mare had a difficult birth, which my grandfather didn't realize until too late, and the foal died.

ACT
American College Test. A competitor of the SAT test. The organization that administers the test now styles itself ACT -- Information for Life's Transitions, and insists that it was only ``formerly American College Testing.'' (For a similar example see the SPIE. I mean, International Business Machines is now officially just IBM, but they don't make a big fuss about it, and you can even find the expansion that led to the name on their web pages.) What tendentious nonsense. (For your inconvenience, we serve at least one other certifiably tendentious link.)

Apart from the general organization website linked above, ACT has a short-words-and-simple-sentences ``student site for ACT test takers.'' Cartoons and photographs are ``diverse'' or ``balanced.'' (I.e., if there are fewer than ten student models in a page view, then any white male must be able to pass for Hispanic. The color-calibrated society. I'm sure that the people involved in these travesties don't suspect they are pandering, disingenuous, or sneakily offensive. Where are the redheads!? Why aren't there any redheads?! They didn't include redheads! We're being objectified! Oppression! Oppression!)

The ACT must be one of the most superfluous of college entrance exams. Competitive schools rely on the SAT.

ACT
American Conservatory Theater. In San Francisco.

ACT
Australian Capital Territory. This contains the national capital Canberra, and is completely surrounded by the state of New South Wales. In 1915, the Commonwealth government purchased the Jervis Bay Territory from the state of New South Wales, so that Canberra would have access to the sea. This is great; now all that Canberra needs is access to the Jervis Bay Territory. Jervis Bay Territory is still a separate, federally administered territory, but for practical purposes (no, I'm not sure how practical) it is part of the ACT, and I've seen it called the Jervis Bay Exclave of the Australian Capital Territory.

Jervis is a name like Berkeley. In both cases, the eponym (British admiral John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent; Bishop George Berkeley) has a first-syllable er that was pronounced like the word are, and in both cases the toponym (Jervis Bay, Australia; Berkeley, California) has regularized the sound to er.

ACTA
American Council of (University) Trustees and Alumni.

Acta Diurna
Tijdschrift voor Latinisten en aanverwanten. A Dutch classics journal. I'll get back to this entry when their website is finished. Okay, okay: I mean I'll get back to it when the website has an English version.

ACTC
Association canadienne de télévision par câble. English CCTA.

ACTD
Advanced-Concept Technology Demonstration.

Actel
An FPGA designer and developer (they subcontract manufacture to a number of foundries). As of 1995, Actel and Xilinx dominated FPGA world market.

ACTF
American College Theatre Festival. That's officially the KC/ACTF.

ACTFL
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Its five regional affiliates are SCOLT, SWCOLT, CSC, NECTFL, and PNCFL.

See also NADSFL, NCSSFL.

ACTG
AIDS Clinical Trials Group.

ACTH
AdrenoCorticoTropic Hormone. Also called corticotropin, but I guess that didn't lend itself to a very distinctive initialism. ACTH stimulates the secretory activity of the adrenal glands. ACTH in its turn is produced by the anterior pituitary, which is stimulated to release it by the aptly named CRH.

ACTH levels in the blood vary over the course of the day. The normal range is up to 80 pg/ml at 8-10 AM, unless you keep weird hours like me. (Yeah, the units there are picograms per milliliter. When you're talking hormones, a little bit goes a long way.)

ACT II
Advanced Concepts and Technology II. A military procurement program.

activated
Depending exponentially on 1/T. That is, varying as
exp( -Eact / kBT ) ,
where kB is Boltzmann's constant, T is absolute temperature, and Eact is called an activation energy, and lies approximately in the range of 0.1 to 10 eV for phenomena that exhibit activation at room temperature. Activated behavior is commonly observed in transport and reaction coefficients for phonon-assisted processes (e.g., atomic and ionic diffusivity, electron and hole mobility in materials with strong electron-phonon coupling that leads to localized carriers, carrier density and conductivity in intrinsic semiconductors).

Activated temperature dependence is also called Arrhenius behavior. See more at the Arrhenius plot entry.

activator
In the field of adhesives and sealants (A&S), an activator is a chemical applied to bonding surfaces to prepare them for bonding.

active filter
A filter circuit which includes electronic components that are active, in the electronic device sense (transistors, op amps, maybe some more exotic devices). Any filter that is not a passive filter.

Of course, any digital filter is active, but the term active filter tends to imply an analog filter.

active learning
A buzzword popular among educrats and their ilk. The term is associated with the idea that lectures are dry and don't engage students. ``Active learning'' is the putative alternative.

active words
Most students of a foreign language are aware of a grammatical distinction in the category of ``voice.'' Declarative sentences may be in the active voice or the passive voice. A typical sentence in the active voice would be
Fat Bob used the elevator.

I want to take a moment here to apologize to readers who are radially challenged, or whatever the current euphemism is. When the sentence is cast into the passive voice, it becomes

The elevator was used by Fat Bob.

Now in both Fat-Bob sentences above, Fat Bob is the ``agent'' of the action performed by the verb. He performs the action, even though the action may not seem like much of a performance. It's true that the elevator does the heavy lifting, but the verb is not ``lift.'' The verb is use, and it is Bob who does the using, so Bob is the agent.

Sorry to break off like this, but the entry is under construction. Fat Bob is the ``subject'' or ``agent'' of the sentence. He performs the action, even though it's not much of a performance

activity
The extensive rate of nuclear decay. That is, the number of decays per unit time. The SI unit of activity is the becquerel (abbreviated Bq), defined as one decay per second.

activity
The ratio of the fugacity of a substance in solution to its fugacity in the liquid state.

The law of mass action in its simplest form expresses equilibrium in terms of concentrations or partial pressures. This is a kind ideal-gas approximation; the correct formulation replaces concentrations with fugacities. (This doesn't instantly solve the problem, of course, since one has the problem of determining the fugacity function.)

activity coefficient
The ratio of the fugacity to whatever is the usual measure of concentration (partial pressure of a gas, mole fraction of a liquid, molar or molal concentration in a solution) used in the law of mass action. Activity coefficients (written as gammas with subscripts indicating chemical component) are factored into the law of mass action for a more realistic description (see preceding activity entry).

ACTLU
ACTivate Logical Unit. (SNA.) That doesn't mean activate the unit that logic would suggest activating. The term ``logical'' is in contradistinction to ``physical,'' and refers to alternate ways of designating devices. Logical names or addresses are assignable, they're handles; physical names are essentially dictated by hardware.

Does sound vaguely reminiscent of Lovecraft's Cthulu, doesn't it? Not even a little bit?

Act of God
Earthquake, famine, flood, pestilence... Is that what He's been doing lately?

ACTPU
ACTivate Physical Unit. (SNA.) Cf. preceding entry (ACTLU).

ACTR
American Council of Teachers of Russian. ``to advance research, training, and the materials development in the fields of Russian and English languages, as well as strengthen communication between the communities of scholars and educators in language, literature, and area studies in the United States and the former Soviet Union.'' Whatever. Founded in 1974, it spawned ACCELS in 1987, and ACTR and ACCELS were folded into a new organization in 1998.

ACTR/ACCELS
Just look up ACTR and ACCELS, willya?

AC Transit
Alameda County (CA) TRANSIT. Buses.

ACTS
Advanced Communications Technologies and Services. An R&D program for developing telecommunications. Established by the 4th Framework Programme of the European Union.

ACTS
Advanced Communications Technology Satellite.

ACTS
Association canadienne des télécommunications sans fil. English CWTA.

[phone icon]

ACTS
Automatic Coin Telephone Service. Related acronym is COCOT.

ACT-UP, Act-Up
AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. Known in its early days for desperate outrageousness.

[column]

actus
A Roman unit of length equal to about 36 meters, or about 118 (Eng.) feet.

ACTWU
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers' Union.

ACT11
Advanced CMOS logic using TTL voltage levels, and having center ground and power pins. Cf. AC11.

ACU
American Christian University. Oh God what a slow-loading homepage.

Update January 2005: obviously thanks to God, the page loads much faster now. Thank you for your prayers -- they were obviously effective.

ACU
American Conservative Union. The oldest conservative lobbying organization in the US: founded in 1964, the year of Barry Goldwater's landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson.

ACU
Antenna Control Unit.

ACUC
Animal Care and Use Committee.

The January 1987 issue of Laboratory Animal Science was a special issue on ``Effective Animal Care and Use Committees.'' Thumbing through it to titillate my uh, to satisfy my curios..., uh, to investigate research into animal pain, I found a couple of titles that whispered heresy! Richard J. Traystman, Ph.D., asked ``ACUC, Who Needs It?: The Investigator's Viewpoint'' (pp. 108-110), while Joseph R. Geraci, V.M.D., Ph.D. and Dean H. Percy (no picture) asked ``Are Animal Care and Use Committees Really Needed?'' (pp. 111-112).

Let me give you a hint about reading scientific papers besides ``don't'': after the title, read the concluding paragraph. The introduction is just a build-up to demonstrate that the topic is more serious, important and interesting than it seems, despite being one of 300,000 published that week. Also, if the article is reviewed, it is good to cite the previous important and excellent work of anyone who may be referee for the article. Asphyxiating as I bated my breath, I cut to the chase.

Geraci and Percy's concluding paragraph begins ``In answer to our original question, ACUCs really are needed.'' Let me take a moment here to point out that the only justification for the use of italics in a scientific paper is to distinguish vectors from scalars.

Breathing more easily now, I notice that the next sentence contains some meaningful information: ``While to some observers their functions may appear to be mundane and unimportant, active ACUCs ...'' I commend the syntactical virtues of this admission to your attentive attention. Recognize that writing, like any game, has both offensive and defensive maneuvers. In the first place, defensive writing requires that one not write anything one would regret having quoted back to one. Crafting effective defensive prose requires one to anticipate the offensive maneuvers of the opponent or ``quoter.'' The ``quoter'' pares away words, like a sculptor chipping away excess material, ultimately leaving a work of art. Thus, any sufficiently long piece of prose can be edited to something like ``... I ... like ... [young boys] ....'' The rules of the game more or less require the ellipses and brackets, so the ``quoter'' prefers to be able to use big slabs of text without square-bracket interpolations. Returning, then, to the defensive task at hand, remember: Conjugation is your friend. That is, if a predatory quoter wants to twist your prose into a demonstration that you believe a proposition that you have merely stated as a straw man, inconvenient syntax protects you. In this instance, for example, the text might have read ``Some observers think that the functions of ACUCs are mundane and unimportant, but ....'' Such phrasing is vulnerable to editing into ``ACUCs are mundane and unimportant.'' As defensively organized, however, the verb is appear, and the copula is in infinitive form, so predatory quoters are forced to use more evident modification.

The English language draws its strength from active verbs. How much better ``Dick ran'' than ``Dick was in the process of running''! Hence, if the authors had been writing with no other purpose in mind than to produce clear, taut prose, the ``to be'' in the sentence should have been discarded: ``... functions may appear mundane and unimportant...'' There is no sanction in defensive wording for not compressing the sentence in this way, but flabby writing is a hard habit to break.

According to Traystman's concluding paragraph: ``The answer of course is, all of us need it!!'' You know, some authors of papers in scientific journals seem not to be aware of it, but the use of exclamation marks for emphasis WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!!!!!!!!! The only reason for exclamation marks is to indicate factorial and double factorial. If t is a positive integer,

t! = t * (t-1) * (t-2) * ... * 3 * 2 * 1

t!! = t * (t-2) * (t-4) * ... * (4 or 3) * (2 or 1).

For more on lab animals, see the AWA entry.

ACUS
(US) Army Common User System. A communications system.

acute
Sharp.

In medical usage, the sense of acute is sharply restricted. It refers to health effects that are sharply restricted in time -- of sudden or rapid onset and brief duration. If you imagine a graph of pain or some other measure of morbidity plotted as a function of time, then a sudden onset with rapid decrease immediately after will look like a ``sharp'' spike, so the term is etymologically reasonable in more than just a loosely transferred sense.

On the other hand, use of the term ``acute'' does imply some level of severity: if the pain is not very intense, or the symptom not severe, then the spike will not be very high, and would look not sharp but stubby.

There are a lot of interesting mathematical things one could say about the maximum, topology, coarse-graining, natural scales and dimensional analysis, but physicians rarely think about these wonderful things. Suffice it to say that it is reasonable from the perspective of a scientist's use of language that ``acute'' should mean of rapid onset and short duration, given that the thing described exceeds some threshold level of noticeability. Most decisively, however, the usage is an established convention.

Note that there is no special term implying brief duration without sudden onset. The reason is tautology: if the onset is not rapid, then the duration can't be brief.

Acute is contrasted with chronic.

ACUTE
Accountants Computer Users Technical Exchange. So sophisticated it doesn't need a website, I guess. The expansion given here uses the most commonly encountered inflection of the first word, although it doesn't make sense. Accounting and Accountants', which make more sense, are less common. The thing exchanged is information; ACUTE organizes seminars. They had annual meetings at least as far back as the mid-1980's. I think this organization may have gone out of operation in the mid-nineties.

ACV
Advanced Cargo Vehicle. Old NASA acronym.

A.C.V., ACV
Allegheny Clarion Valley. I must have been in Clarion (I-80 Pennsylvania exits 62 and 64) at least a dozen times in the past dozen years (to 2008), and at least a time or two in Emlenton (exit 42). In Clarion I managed never to encounter this abbreviation. In Emlenton it's everywhere. The reason seems to be that Clarion is not in the Allegheny Clarion Valley.

There are three Clarions in Pennsylvania: Clarion County, and Clarion Township and Clarion Borough, which are in the county. Clarion Borough is almost completely surrounded by Clarion Township, though the borough shares perhaps 150 meters of border with Highland Township. The borough of Clarion is the county seat of Clarion County.

Emlenton Borough straddles the border of Clarion and Venango counties. Children of that borough and some other villages and unincorporated areas attend public schools of the Allegheny Clarion Valley School District. This school district has the unique distinction of being the only school district in Pennsylvania to span parts of four counties (Armstrong, Butler, Clarion and Venango). The ACVSD seems to be the only official government entity to bear the ACV moniker; I would guess that the region was named after the school district.

ACVA
American College of Veterinary Anesthesiologists.

ACVA
American Council for Voluntary Agencies in Foreign Service. Merged with PAID in 1984 to form InterAction. I guess you could say that InterAction put PAID to the ACVA. (I sincerely apologize.)

A-C Valley
Allegheny Clarion Valley, more often A.C.V.

ACVCP
American College of Veterinary Clinical Pharmacology.

ACVD
Acute (ac) CardioVascular Disease. Vide gravy and coup de grâce.

ACVIM
American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine.

ACVM
American College of Veterinary Microbiologists.

ACVO
American College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists. For more like this, try the Dog Fanciers' Acronym List.

ACVP
American College of Veterinary Pathologists. It's ``an international organization for those specializing in veterinary and comparative pathology.'' The ACVP and ASVCP hold a joint annual meeting.

ACVPM
American College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine.

ACVR
American College of Veterinary Radiology.

ACVS
American College of Veterinary Surgeons.

ACVSD
Allegheny Clarion Valley School District. See ACV.

acyl
A radical derived from a carboxylic acid by the removal of the hydroxyl group from a carboxyl group:
                        R
                         \
                          \
acid:                      C == O
                          /
                         /
                       HO


                        R
                         \
                          \
acyl:                      C == O
                          /
                         /

For the specific case of R a methyl group, the acyl is acetyl.

acyclovir
ACYCLOguanosine. A drug, used against herpes, that inhibits expression of VIRal DNA.

AC11
Advanced CMOS logic with center ground and power pins. Cf. ACT11.

AC-3
Audio Code #3. Designation during development of a Dolby code that became Dolby Digital. It has five channels: center, left, and right, and rear/surround left and right. There's a subwoofer separated off the rear channels, so it is also sometimes called a 5.1 (channel) system.

ad
ADvertisement. Look, all three major Scrabble dictionaries accept even admass. A fortiori, they must accept ad (and its plural ads).

Challenge!

Okay, okay: mere logic can't guarantee that a word is valid, but in this case the ``reasoning trick'' happens to work.

AD
Aggregate Demand. A macroeconomic fiction.

AD
Agriculture Dept. That is, the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

AD
Air Defense.

AD
Alzheimer's Disease. Related entries: Alzheimer's Association (AA), ApoE4, NSAID, PHF.

Old name: Presenile dementia.

AD
American Demographics Magazine. This indie mag publishes some of the most intriguing research anywhere in the Geisteswissenschaften (vide War of the Words). For example, research reported there found that roach spray sells especially well among lower-class southern women because killing roaches represents a symbolic fantasy fulfillment for these consumers: they tend to regard roaches as very similar to their husbands. There was differential analysis to determine whether the larger size of the roaches was correlated, but...

Other research found that many overweight men deliberately buy shirts that are too tight because they want to emphasize their protuberant bellies.

.ad
(Domain name code for) Andorra.

Rec.Travel offers some links. The CIA Factbook has some basic information on Andorra.

A.D., AD
Anno Domini. Lat.: `(in the) year of (the) Lord.' There is a widespread incorrect belief that AD stands for ``After [Jesus's corporeal] Death.'' This would require three dating eras: Before, During, and After. As it happens, dating in more than three eras that include A.D. has been tried (see explanation at B.C. entry). Cf. CE.

One of the clever turns of phrase in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was returning to the archaic form ``Year of our Lord,'' and naming years as ``Year of our [Henry] Ford.'' (I've seen AF used to represent this dating scheme, though I don't think it occurs in the book. Since it seems reasonable to treat Ford as a gens, the Latin nominative would probably be Fordius, yielding Anno Fordii.) The book begins in 632 AF, or 2540 AD, making 1909 of our era -- the year the Model T was introduced -- year one of the Fordian. The book was published in 1932. Perhaps the 632 date was selected to suggest an uneasy proximity in time. There may be something similar in the other classic dystopian story of the mid-twentieth century, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book was finished in nineteen forty-eight. (It was published in 1949, and Orwell himself was finished in 1950.)

Another expression, more common in Britain, was ``Year of our Grace.''

English is unusual, among European languages, in using a foreign-language expression to designate dates in the current era. It seems that most other languages now use a native expression for A.D. (as well as B.C.).

There is a sketchy introduction to Latin declensions in the A.M. entry that explains why, if you tried to find anno and domini in a Latin dictionary, the closest you'd probably come would be "annus, -i, m." and "dominus, -i, m."

If you wanted to be pretentious, you could read off ``A.D. 2000'' as ``Anno Domini 2000.' If you did that, however, you'd want to be consistently grammatical and use the plural for ``A.D. 2000-2004'': ``Annis Domini 2000-2004.'' If you have to look it up, you're probably safer saying ``ay dee 2000....''

The words century and decade were once used like dozen -- to refer to a number (100 and 10, like 12) of anything, but eventually the use became restricted to years. Hence, if we were to decline A.D. properly in ``1st century A.D.,'' it would be Annorum Domini -- `[century] of years of the Lord.' Here annorum is annum in the plural genitive form.

[column] Even in Late Roman times, this abbreviation, and mode of reckoning dates, was not used. The ASGLE serves two kinds of lists of epigraphic latin abbreviations, which include both common and at-all reported (in APh 1888-1993) meanings for AD.

AD
Analog Devices semiconductor device prefix. They used to serve a nice glossary.

AD, A/D
Analog-Digital. ADC is analog-to-digitial converter.

AD
Application Development.

AD
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Druckbehälter. German: `Pressure measurement Working Group.'

A.D.
Assembly District. Most US states have bicameral legislatures, and the lower or larger house is often called the Assembly.

AD
Assistant Director. In movie and TV-show production, this turns out to be a productive suffix. In fact, for clarity AD is often rendered as 1AD (for first assistant director), distinguished from the 2AD, 3AD, and 22AD. (22 = 3 mod show biz -- no wonder they have huge cost overruns! -- see the second second entry for details. Let me be clearer about that: I mean the first and only second second entry. Ummm, just follow the link.) Some productions have a 4AD. That hat may alternatively be labeled AAD (additional AD) or Key PA (key production assistant).

AD
Athletic Director. A good athletic director lets the university president think that he (the president) is more important.

Look -- any doofus can come up with a weak pun involving athletic directors and athletic supporters. I'm just not any doofus, so I'm just not gonna.

ad, a.d.
Auris Dextra. Lat., `right ear.' [Not the right one as opposed to the wrong one. The right one as opposed to the left one. That is, the one on the right side of your or anyone else's head, as determined by looking in the mirror and seeing which one is closer to the right shoulder (of the same person). This operational definition breaks down for owls and other neck contortionists. If you're having difficulty with these instructions, you probably need to have your head examined by a professional.]

These puppies usually come in pairs. The other one is a.s.

An alternative possible translation of the Latin would be `fortunate ear.'

ADA
Academy of Dispensing Audiologists. Sounds like PEZ for the ear.

``The Academy of Dispensing Audiologists®, founded in 1976, provides valuable resources to the private practitioner in audiology and to other audiology professionals who have responsibility for the concerns of quality patient care and business operation.''

A heavily laden sentence like this is a sort of anagram that has to be unpacked: A ``quality patient'' does indeed provide ``valuable resources'' to the ``business operation,'' but you have to be a ``private practitioner'' to really tap into that cash.

ADA
Air-Defense Artillery.

ADA